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by melonakos
4229 days ago
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Yes, our primary method of making money will be through open source monetization strategies. I wrote thoughts on this here: http://notonlyluck.com/2014/01/16/monetizing-open-source-pro... I bet the market conditions that led to this are broader than just GPU computing. I think it would more generally apply to any middleware business. But it is certainly more palatable for people in scientific computing and HPC to use something free and later pay for support and services and addons. Once people start really relying on the free thing, that reliance can be monetized. In this sense, it is more "scalable" to have an open source product which is readily adoptable by early users than to attempt to sell a product to buyers that have not yet started to rely upon it and have a good distance to go before reliance sets in. This is not SaaS and never will be, haha. Allocation of future resources is something that we have considered a lot. I wrote before about opportunity costs associated with an open source business model: http://notonlyluck.com/2014/08/13/opportunity-costs-required... We just open sourced today, but our plan is to treat the open source product the same as we have always treated it even when it was proprietary. Great questions! Hit me up on Twitter @melonakos. Would be good to connect more with you, especially if you are going to SC'14 next week. |
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I do think that libraries should be distributed as open source, but I'm also hoping that at least in certain areas there is a way to commercially develop them as a product business. Provocatively speaking, if software "eats the world", then libraries are too important to just be developed as a by-product of some other ventures or in support of a platform/eco system.
Personally I'm planning on releasing a library under a GPL + commercial dual licensing scheme and later on another library under a non-commercial (incl. academic and government research) + commercial dual license. We'll see how that works out.