The chemfp project: problems selling free software
I started the chemfp project in part to see if I could develop a self-funded free&#x2F;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 &quot;short&quot;&#x2F;O(1024 bit) bitstrings.)<p>The answer: no.<p>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&#x2F;&quot;software hoarding&quot; licensing models.<p>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! As a result, chemfp is, I believe, the fastest single-threaded Tanimoto search implementation for CPUs available, and most likely memory bandwidth limited, not CPU limited.<p>(Note: the mods asked me to repost. My earlier post is at <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=23598470" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=23598470</a> .)