On Thu, 15 Sep 2005, Christian Tismer wrote:
Making money out of PyPy
Jacob asked me on the last sprint, if it is possible to make money out of PyPy right now. I passed this around once, but would like to insist. I am personally interested to make PyPy move away a bit from its purely academical status and to think a little bit about how we can create practical applications in the near future, which allow to grow marketable services for our members, in order to reduce PyPy's dependency from the EU sponsoring.
Hey all, I've only been reading these updates, and I haven't actually played with PyPy in while, so I could be way off here. But I do run a business and know a little bit about marketing, and I head up another python compiler project (pirate) so I know a little bit about the market demand for these things... :) Basically, there are really that many applications of this technology in its current state. The stated goal for this project is just to make a faster version of python, but can you really charge for that given that pypy is already open source? One option could be to find people who need python to run fast and get them to pay you to handle the cases that apply to *their project* up front, but I really don't think this is a viable market. It's much cheaper for the client to just write a C extension or port the whole thing to C. Another option is that you could use your technology created in pypy to create new *frontends* for pypy, and sell the service of taking legacy code in other languages, and translating that into call trees, and turning it magically into python or lisp or c... This seems like it could be a much more lucrative service, but it's a whole new research project and it takes you away from your core focus on python. (On the other hand, a company that did this would have a massive incentive to sponsor pypy development... Maybe there's a company that already does this kind of thing with some other technology... Like, say, people just rewriting things by hand? Another idea has to do with the sprints. I already told Holger this a while back, but I think you guys have one of the most impressive project management styles around, and the sprint idea seems like a great amount of fun. What if you capitalized on *that*? A week in europe to work on an open source project? That would be an awesome vacation! And to get to learn about compilers and python along the way? What I'm saying is you could market the sprints as a sort of training package for big companies interested in trying out python. They send their developers and pay you guys to train them. Even if the companies don't care about python, their developers *might* and that could be a great reward. Wasn't there a post just like this from someone in the army a while back? Market demand. :) Heck, do your next sprint as a partnership with these guys: http://www.geekcruises.com/ Anyway, it might be a crazy idea, but if you could get it working, it would capitalize on what you're already doing rather than force you to come up with some other devlepoment project off to the side... Sincerely, Michal J Wallace Sabren Enterprises, Inc. ------------------------------------- contact: michal@sabren.com hosting: http://www.cornerhost.com/ my site: http://www.withoutane.com/ -------------------------------------