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by __hugues 593 days ago
Yeah, communication tools are not a good fit for this experiment.

What I had in mind was mostly dev tools (e.g. slipcover, ruff, uv, ...) where

- individuals being able to freely use them on personal/unreleased code, and anyone being able to use freely them on open source projects unlocks a ton of public benefit

- large tech companies might legitimately cut their ec2 costs by 50% or more thanks to the increased efficiency

- there is not much room for SaaS or maintenance contracts to generate an income for the original author

Having a short period people working on projects they are unwilling to open source are incentivized to share a portion of their cost savings seems like it would be a low-hassle way to foster a healthy ecosystem of public benefit tooling