just like MongoDB https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18229013
and docker desktop https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28369570
and Elastic Search https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25776657
Given the increasing number of restrictions and monetisation efforts for docker hub, I suspect docker desktop at least has not had the immediate effect they hoped.
As for elasticsearch, a lot of projects seem to be adopting a "wait-and-see" approach on the last open version, 7.10, while others have moved to Open Search (e.g. https://docs.graylog.org/docs/installing )
That said, mold I think is a difficult project to monetize broadly for a few reasons, but certainly nowhere close to impossible, and I do believe it's a project that can support a couple developers, with some clients. And I believe it's going to be vastly easier to do that than relying donations and draining your savings account, if I'm being honest, with a bit of experience in this realm.
Let's not tell ourselves lies. Corporate, commercial software development, for money, and licensing software under pay-for-use terms, is how almost all software developers make money. Not by GitHub donations and wishful thinking and pontificating on Hacker News. In fact many of these entities even use open source/free software to accelerate the development of their products, so they can be licensed for the same amount of money, yet they don't contribute anything back — despite the fact their production costs were lower than they would be otherwise. The idea here is to increase the "surplus value" (google it) that they can capture. I will leave readers to think about these words since they are relevant to this discussion and the story of mold.
Most software by far is developed and supported in-house, not sold as a COTS product. For in-house software that doesn't see any broader distribution, the distinction between "open" and "proprietary" is pretty much immaterial. Even the comparatively strict GPL license allows for private modification.
In practice, this usually means, "Do they want to mostly give up coding and learn how to sell to corporations?" It's not necessarily a bad thing! Corporations have money and selling to them can be an interesting challenge.
But it's not a thing that happens easily or automatically, unless you have a product which has achieved an extraordinary level of appeal to customers. It's hard work, and it doesn't necessarily leave time to code.
