[rektide]

Reasonable but death. Rather than become a part of the world, this immense value would be a mere glimmer, would not get adopted at any notable scale.

It sucks. Whats happening now isnt fine. I wish so much the world could recognize value & merit & allocate some support for it.

But all the rationalization in the world doesnt change the base truth that this plan would mean death.

[smoldesu]

I mean, the alternative is that the lead developer runs out of money and just drops the project altogether. If they have an enterprising personality, I see no reason why they shouldn't chase this opportunity as an alternative to letting their project fall apart/get "adopted" by an abusive maintainer.

[ghaff]

I think the parent's point is that, if they weren't able to make money off it before, they almost certainly won't by slapping a more restrictive license on it.

[homarp]

>if they weren't able to make money off it before

just like MongoDB https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18229013

and docker desktop https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28369570

and Elastic Search https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25776657

[Macha]

I think with the exception of MongoDB, it's too early to ascertain the impact of this on the profitability of these projects.

Given the increasing number of restrictions and monetisation efforts for docker hub, I suspect docker desktop at least has not had the immediate effect they hoped.

As for elasticsearch, a lot of projects seem to be adopting a "wait-and-see" approach on the last open version, 7.10, while others have moved to Open Search (e.g. https://docs.graylog.org/docs/installing )

[aseipp]

No, that's just wishful thinking so FOSS developers can get on a high horse and not look in the mirror. "Seeking donations to support development" and "Making large users pay for a license" are completely different income models. A few licenses for commercial software with ongoing support can easily cover years of community donations, in my experience. Coincidentally, guess which one of those two models is the most successful as far as "allowing independent software developers to support themselves" goes?

That said, mold I think is a difficult project to monetize broadly for a few reasons, but certainly nowhere close to impossible, and I do believe it's a project that can support a couple developers, with some clients. And I believe it's going to be vastly easier to do that than relying donations and draining your savings account, if I'm being honest, with a bit of experience in this realm.

Let's not tell ourselves lies. Corporate, commercial software development, for money, and licensing software under pay-for-use terms, is how almost all software developers make money. Not by GitHub donations and wishful thinking and pontificating on Hacker News. In fact many of these entities even use open source/free software to accelerate the development of their products, so they can be licensed for the same amount of money, yet they don't contribute anything back — despite the fact their production costs were lower than they would be otherwise. The idea here is to increase the "surplus value" (google it) that they can capture. I will leave readers to think about these words since they are relevant to this discussion and the story of mold.

[zozbot234]

> Corporate, commercial software development, for money, and licensing software under pay-for-use terms, is how almost all software developers make money.

Most software by far is developed and supported in-house, not sold as a COTS product. For in-house software that doesn't see any broader distribution, the distinction between "open" and "proprietary" is pretty much immaterial. Even the comparatively strict GPL license allows for private modification.

[thrown_22]

Nothing of a lot is a lot less than all of a little.

[ekidd]

> If they have an enterprising personality

In practice, this usually means, "Do they want to mostly give up coding and learn how to sell to corporations?" It's not necessarily a bad thing! Corporations have money and selling to them can be an interesting challenge.

But it's not a thing that happens easily or automatically, unless you have a product which has achieved an extraordinary level of appeal to customers. It's hard work, and it doesn't necessarily leave time to code.

[delusional]

I don't see any personal issue with the author doing what they're doing. I think it's an implication of the current system that he has to.

[nicoburns]

Potentially the other alternative would be a large tech company hires them to work on an open source mold full time.

[smoldesu]

That doesn't really end up going well either. There are many such cases where Red Hat/Microsoft/Apple/Facebook/Amazon buys up a sterling young FOSS developer and makes them spend the rest of their life fixing the issues for [PRODUCT] while their project becomes less-and-less relevant by the day (see: CUPS, Clang, Minix).

[nrabulinski]

How has cups or clang became less relevant?

[smoldesu]

CUPS is still great but mostly because it's initial implementation was so straightforward. It's existence today is mostly maintenance-mode with a priority for fixing Mac bugs, which is understandable but also occludes the possibility for future improvement or adding support for other platforms.

Clang is still relevant because LLVM is great, but as a compiler it's mired in a great deal of political hangups and general pickiness. I don't write C++ for a living, but my experience using the GNU C tooling has been much smoother than Clang and Cmake.

I'll admit that both of those projects aren't exactly dead, but it would be a shame if Microsoft/Google/Apple bought Mold and malformed it to their desires.

[jabl]

> CUPS is still great but mostly because it's initial implementation was so straightforward. It's existence today is mostly maintenance-mode with a priority for fixing Mac bugs, which is understandable but also occludes the possibility for future improvement or adding support for other platforms.

The CUPS lead author left Apple a couple of years ago, and CUPS development is now mostly focused on Linux under the auspices of the Openprinting organization. (I understand the CUPS lead author still has some side consulting gig in providing bug fixes to Apples version of CUPS.)

[pabs3]

CUPS is doing well outside of Apple at OpenPrinting these days:

https://openprinting.github.io

[counttheforks]

What do you think will happen when there's no funding nor motivation to maintain the project? Death.

[spijdar]

I'm of a mind to agree with GP, but I also agree that lack of funding and motivation will kill the project.

Unfortunately, to me this just means the project will probably die. If the author is feeling burnt out and losing money on it, I don't think trying to pivot to a commercial license will help, since as others have mentioned, I don't think many businesses rely on mold specifically, and since the performance gap isn't astronomical, many companies will just drop in lld and be done with it.

At least, that seems likely to me. I guess we might find out?

[ketralnis]

> would not get adopted at any notable scale

Sure, it doesn't sound like that's their goal