[hedora]

As a corporate open source developer, we would be forced to switch off mold immediately if we were using it, for at least two reasons:

1) Whether or not we could get finance to pay for a license, we would not be willing to force the rest of our community to pay.

2) What is a "user"? A developer seat? What if CI / CD has a public facing github queue? Are people submitting PRs users? Do end users of our service count?

I'd strongly suggest a "call for pricing" model until you have good answers to the above. (Good == what the market will bear; figuring out will require you to initiate run ~ 100 customer calls).

Also, why revert to GPL, not AGPL3 or Apache? GPL is a weird middle ground these days. "Some users get Freedom, but unlike with AGPL, Google, AWS and *aaS users get to pound sand. Also, unlike Apache, maybe we will patent troll you later."

This stuff is hard. Good luck!

[googlryas]

Why would you need to switch off immediately? You can still use the version you're using in perpetuity with the license you agreed to.

If the main developer died, would you feel the need to immediately switch off of it? Is anyone even tracking the liveliness of the developer in your org?

[hedora]

Specifically for mold:

It is a commodity (there are other linkers), and the main reason to use it is developer productivity. Using a fast, bitrotting and unsupported linker is worse than using a slow, up-to-date linker.

We'd probably wait one release cycle to switch (maybe the replacement linker introduces bugs or something.)

Having said that, there is a clear line from "linking is 5x faster" to $10-100K annual savings for the business, so I'd support paying a substantial license fee. (I do not hold the purse strings, so that doesn't matter in my current gig.)