[theptip]

If your sauce is algorithmic (both current and future edge) then you cannot be OSS and profitable. Google will open source all sorts of things, but never their recommender algos.

Your best bet is probably a SaaS training platform (I suspect inference is a harder business, as you need to serve high uptime APIs; I guess you have more forgiving SLAs for training batches). Sell to medium-large companies (big enough to need training, not big enough to have an established in-house platform), and if you need to bootstrap at all you can probably do profitable consulting-type work without giving up your core IP, since you can hand off the trained model weights without handing out all of your trade secrets.

Folks around here are going to gripe about this; HN has a contingent of FOSS enthusiasts but these people are not going to give you a dollar, they are not your customers. FOSS is great but you are under no obligation to give away your life work.

Honestly where you have landed (opening up some of your work) is more generous with your time than most people would be; people should be thanking you instead of complaining that it’s not more open. I think giving out enough OSS for people to realize you are the real deal while keeping the biggest wins closed is a good marketing strategy.

[danielhanchen]

Thanks for the nice comment! Ye we tried our best to OSS stuff since that's my passion - to help the OSS community! :)

Agreed on the training platform - yess consulting is also a good point!!

I guess the main point is we don't want to be eaten up by cloud providers, and not repeat the mistakes of other OSS projects like MongoDB with AWS etc.

But thanks for the nice comment and suggestions!