[jonathanlei]

I think if you offer to sell to them, they will probably give you a lowball offer.

Instead, maybe consider trying to grow it on your own, see where you can take it, and if it shows some reasonable traction, a big player would probably definitely offer to swallow you up at a good offer so that they get the better technology that's already been demonstrated to work in a production environment.

Just my $0.02 :)

[semantic123]

Thank you for your thoughts. This makes a lot of sense.

Getting traction, i.e. getting people to use this, is hard. Because 90% of the market already uses a subscription to one of the two big players. That’s why I was hoping to maybe monetize the technology itself. To somebody who already has customers it would be worth a lot more than to somebody who has none.

I think I don’t want to spend the time and energy to make this into a production environment.

A lowball offer, combined with the chance of my work having an impact, actually looks pretty good in comparison to the most likely alternative. Which is that I’ll just drop the project and move on.

[tunap]

A possible 3rd scenario is, you meet and make a presentation, BigSearch asks some pointed questions and immediately reverse engineers it to produce a 1-off copy, while giving no remuneration.

[semantic123]

Sure. Though they would still give me the satisfaction of knowing that their product was brought into being by my work. Which is to say, better still than letting what I have rot away in a drawer until someone else comes along and builds an identical thing two years from now. That being said, getting some part of the profits also would be even nicer.

[tunap]

I like your attitude. If more people gave a little, it would be a fundamentally different world.

Just a shot in the dark, but maybe pitch it to the EFF?

https://www.eff.org/cases