Instead, maybe consider trying to grow it on your own, see where you can take it, and if it shows some reasonable traction, a big player would probably definitely offer to swallow you up at a good offer so that they get the better technology that's already been demonstrated to work in a production environment.
Just my $0.02 :)
Getting traction, i.e. getting people to use this, is hard. Because 90% of the market already uses a subscription to one of the two big players. That’s why I was hoping to maybe monetize the technology itself. To somebody who already has customers it would be worth a lot more than to somebody who has none.
I think I don’t want to spend the time and energy to make this into a production environment.
A lowball offer, combined with the chance of my work having an impact, actually looks pretty good in comparison to the most likely alternative. Which is that I’ll just drop the project and move on.
Just a shot in the dark, but maybe pitch it to the EFF?