I find myself defaulting to Linux for Rust development these days, mostly because Mold makes the inner loop of development so much faster.
( I hope more US companies are opened to truly remote )
*in the US.
In my country, those salaries are completely unheard of.
I live in the UK and dev salaries are maybe half of the US, but people don't leave in droves because there are other factors - family, friends, quality of life, effort of moving your life across continents, etc.
Look at Sidekiq for inspiration on how to charge for open source.
> This is also a bit unusual business model because mold can be used for free.
You're selling the copyright, right? That's ok - businesses pay for stuff like this. Although I wonder if instead you'd be better off if you created a corporation and instead offered to sell the company's IP + your commitment to support the work over ~1-2 years. This might be a more common scenario for M&A teams to work with. Especially if you are keen on supporting more target architectures/OSs. Someone like ARM or SiFive or FAANG would easily shell out that kind of money to get mold.
Basically, I think your best chance of generating interest from this is the bottom-up (since the individual engineers are the ones who would be feeling the pain that this could help solve), but I'm not really sure ICs at the companies large enough to be potential customers for this have any likely path forward with the way you've structured things right now. I'm not sure if you're flexible on this at all, and obviously I can't guarantee we'd get anywhere, but if you're interested in hearing more details about the potential use my team (and probably a number of other teams at my company would be able to make use if we were able to work something out), feel free to email me! Any prefix @<my username>.com will forward to my gmail.
Building the software is divided into two steps; compiling your source files into object files, then linking those object files together into an executable. As a project grows, the time taken by the compile step in this development loop stays roughly constant; if you only change a single source file, only that source file has to be recompiled. However, the link step has to link together all your object files, from scratch, every time, so the time taken by the link step grows roughly linearly as the project size grows.
Since mainstream linkers are fairly slows, an incremental build of huge projects is generally dominated by the link step. I've personally experienced the pain of making a small change to Chromium, waiting a second or so for the source file I changed to be recompiled, then waiting a minute or two for the linker to go through every single object file and produce the final executable. Mold would have reduced the build time in the development loop from minutes to seconds.
I hope that helped.