Open Source Business Challenges and Reality
This is not really the right takeaway.  It&#x27;s true, but sort of misses the key issue.<p>A better takeaway would be - there are not a lot of things that move the needle enough for people to want to pay a lot for them when they have alternatives.<p>mold isn&#x27;t one of them for the majority of customers, and developer tools overall is a tough business to make money in.<p>Rui is a genius and an amazing programmer, but even within Google, the llvm ld work was done for particular reasons (I was Rui&#x27;s director for many years, and was responsible for approving and funding the work). Speed was one of them for sure.  But it wasn&#x27;t the only one, and more importantly, we had particular use cases and clients where the work <i>would</i> move the needle.  We had lots of data and knew where and when we could improve things, whether through LLD or other things.<p>Otherwise we would not have done it.<p>For a random customer to want something like mold, and to pay for it, they&#x27;d usually have to have data that suggests it&#x27;s worth it.  Most of them don&#x27;t even have data at all, let alone the ability to say &quot;if we use mold, it will move the needle for us overall&quot;.  Sure, you can spitball the time you will save in compilation, but as lots of research shows, that doesn&#x27;t mean the overall process necessarily gets any faster.<p>Some will buy it anyway - some people will take it on faith, some will think it&#x27;s cool, some are specialized enough that it matters.<p>But overall, if you want people to pay for things, at a minimum, for most people,  you&#x27;d have to be able to help them see that it will enable them to do something like &quot;get features out faster&quot;, not something like &quot;link your programs faster&quot;.  The latter is a means to achieve the former, not an end unto itself.<p>Developer tools is also not a large market overall in the relative scheme of things (look at devops market sizing and CAGR compared to anything else), and never has been.  It has consistently missed estimates, too, no matter whose numbers you use.  It&#x27;s not even a 10 billion dollar market yet, or is just barely one, depending who you ask (estimates are 8-10.4 billion).  Most of this money is eaten by large players (Atlassian, etc).<p>So you are also already working at a disadvantage.