I started the chemfp project to see if I could develop a self-funded free/open source product in my field, cheminformatics. (In short, storing and searching che

I started the chemfp project to see if I could develop a self-funded free/open source product in my field, cheminformatics. (In short, storing and searching chemical information on a computer. Chemfp does very fast Jaccard-Tanimoto similarity search for "short"/O(1024 bit) bitstrings. The answer: no. The paper includes a comprehensive background on the search techniques and the software, which probably doesn't interest most here. The section I linked to highlights some of the problems I had selling software under the principles of free software. For examples: How do I provide a demo if I always provide MIT licensed source code? Academics expect discounts, but they are also the ones most likely to redistribute the code. Which is not a wrong thing to do! But it affects the economics in a way I could never resolve, compared to proprietary/"software hoarding" licensing models. As an HN note, I contracted a couple people to help improve the popcount implementations. HN user nkurz developed and tweaked the AVX2 implementation, and proof-read the paper. Thanks nkurz!