Re: Designing Lisp from scratch

On 3/16/07, [email protected] <[email protected]> wrote:
> In any event, I'm open to suggestions about open source, licensing, etc...
> I want to make money with this, but I don't want anyone to miss out on the
> fun due to licensing issues.

The worst outcome is that something cool gets buried forever due to
licensing issues.  Back at the start of the web boom, some friends and
I wrote a beautiful log analyzer --- one of those designs that was so
great it teaches you things about the problem you hadn't realized
before.  It's gone now.  Nobody will ever see it.  This kind of thing
happens pretty frequently; a lot of good software gets deep-sixed for
business reasons.

I don't want to be discouraging, but I suspect that the commercial
market for language construction systems is extremely small.  I may be
wrong, but I'm betting you haven't sold very many licenses yet.  And
although you (and many others on this list) can probably think of a
dozen ways people could benefit from it, I'll also bet it will be a
very difficult sell.

If I'm right about sales so far, I suggest that you set yourself a
deadline --- six months or a year, say --- and a sales goal in
dollars, and see if you make it.  When the time is up, if you haven't
reached your goal, open-source it.  There are open-source-based
business models, too, so you're not even giving up on the idea of
commercializing it.

For radical tools, I think open-sourcing it may actually improve your
chances of commercializing it, since it allows risk-takers to invest
enough in it for it to show its value.

Sorry if this post is off-topic for the list.  But I think Daniel's is
a common dilemma for innovators, so I thought other folks here might
find it interesting.