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in your future ideas section you have listed a few features or directions that the software could go. what about selling those? in my mind, in order to monetiz

in your future ideas section you have listed a few features or directions that the software could go. what about selling those? in my mind, in order to monetize a greenfields FLOSS project, it seems you need to basically create software so impactful that users are willing to pay for particular features or bug fixes that they need, and that don't already exist in the software. so basically, you have to not only get people to use this new thing, but also get them to be willing to pay for particular improvements to it! quite a task. this first occurred to me when i heard Stallman talk about how one can monetize FLOSS projects by selling bugfixes or improvements. contrast the typical developer-driven setup where a team implements the feature then sells it by selling a new version, upgrade fee, or what have you. so it's a tricky situation, in that one needs to offer a compelling product, but not something so good that individuals can take it from the shelf and never have to do anything to it. however, this is sort of helpful insofar as it acts as a way for you to ship something and then - hopefully - let users drive the product (we'd pay $X for a UI on top). for cheminformatics, i'm not really sure what some killer features are, but you have at least some ideas as potential things to sell. perhaps the community would be interested in pooling together funds for some of those ideas, or a UI/UX, or whatever - but yeah, definitely seems more customer-driven then traditional software.

dalke 6y ago
Yes, those future ideas are also possible salable products, thought the market is smaller. I had hoped that the surplus from the core bitstring search would provide the seed money for their development. Chemfp is (or rather was) at least an order of magnitude faster than its competitors. One of my early customers went from taking 5 days to cluster 1M fingerprints using their internal tool to several hours with a re-writes based on a chemfp core. I figured that was sufficiently impactful. But that was in the early stage when people did fund me to add new features as an open source project. I think that once it got "good enough", people didn't want to fund the incrementally smaller improvements. The commercial version is only about 2x faster than the no-cost version. I would talk with potential customers and they already had the no-cost version installed in-house. Now, there are a lot of other improvements in the commercial version, but it's a variation on the "offer a compelling product" - I was my own competition. That was the primary failure in the original business model, based on Ghostscript. (I didn't realize that hardware companies paid Aladdin to keep up with Adobe Postscript, which provided the reason to pay for the latest version rather a no-cost older version.) I tried crowdfunding a project, ie, "pooling together funds", for another project. It worked, in that it made enough money to fund the software development and the marketing, but it also required a lot of time for the marketing (which I'm not good at), and I would have made more money doing straight consulting work instead of product development. BTW, I focus on "classic" cheminformatics. Similarity search is from the 1980s, with roots in the 1970s. My thesis is that there people haven't looked into these topics in years and there might be orders of magnitude gains by developing better fits to modern architecture, that is, improve existing methods enough that UI/UX changes. Most other people's definition of "killer feature" is "an improveed method predict how a molecule will work in the body."
- cowsandmilk 6y ago
  In addition to the free version becoming good enough, pharma is generally a consolidating market. My experience has been the number of companies buying software has steadily gone down. I sold software with a subscription license and the primary driver of nonrenewal was acquisition. Cubist? Acquired. Dyax? Acquired. And on and on.

dalke 6y ago

Yes, those future ideas are also possible salable products, thought the market is smaller. I had hoped that the surplus from the core bitstring search would provide the seed money for their development. Chemfp is (or rather was) at least an order of magnitude faster than its competitors. One of my early customers went from taking 5 days to cluster 1M fingerprints using their internal tool to several hours with a re-writes based on a chemfp core. I figured that was sufficiently impactful. But that was in the early stage when people did fund me to add new features as an open source project. I think that once it got "good enough", people didn't want to fund the incrementally smaller improvements. The commercial version is only about 2x faster than the no-cost version. I would talk with potential customers and they already had the no-cost version installed in-house. Now, there are a lot of other improvements in the commercial version, but it's a variation on the "offer a compelling product" - I was my own competition. That was the primary failure in the original business model, based on Ghostscript. (I didn't realize that hardware companies paid Aladdin to keep up with Adobe Postscript, which provided the reason to pay for the latest version rather a no-cost older version.) I tried crowdfunding a project, ie, "pooling together funds", for another project. It worked, in that it made enough money to fund the software development and the marketing, but it also required a lot of time for the marketing (which I'm not good at), and I would have made more money doing straight consulting work instead of product development. BTW, I focus on "classic" cheminformatics. Similarity search is from the 1980s, with roots in the 1970s. My thesis is that there people haven't looked into these topics in years and there might be orders of magnitude gains by developing better fits to modern architecture, that is, improve existing methods enough that UI/UX changes. Most other people's definition of "killer feature" is "an improveed method predict how a molecule will work in the body."

cowsandmilk 6y ago
In addition to the free version becoming good enough, pharma is generally a consolidating market. My experience has been the number of companies buying software has steadily gone down. I sold software with a subscription license and the primary driver of nonrenewal was acquisition. Cubist? Acquired. Dyax? Acquired. And on and on.