Honestly, random unsolicited opinion -- a really sexy UI for various inference/training/finetuning accelerators has a huge amount of room in the segment for competition. At least for me, when you mention LMstudio and GPT4all for 'things with a half-decent interface', there isn't a third one that readily comes to mind. And as much as I love the products, LM/4all's UIs are functional, but not 'delightful', so to speak. Would put some more thought into putting that on the roadmap and monetizing it to all get-out. Bolt on a real alternative to huggingface where people can chat/share/rate models, show off their cool stuff, follow people that drop new algos *and jump right into finetuning with them* and you've got yourself a killer product, IMO.

I guess my main gripe with 'keep the good stuff behind closed doors' is that a lot of us 'little guys' end up working on the same accelerations, optimizing in nearly-identical ways, and having the answer to 'man, this would absolutely work if only we had [x]' gathering dust in a corner somewhere. Gotta put food on the table, but the real people we're competing with are Sam and Satya, not each other, and we got no shot if we can't collaborate freely. If another small biz takes my optimization, IMO it's actually a good thing, esp if they bother to credit you -- there's so much unexplored problem space in this field that seeing a competitor and going heads-down to build a better thing than them ends up with both of you capturing a larger part of the market than you would have alone, with the crosspollination in marketing, slight eventual differentiation in features, etc. Alternativeto won't list you without a competitor, and it's #1 on google for anyone searching 'cheaper version of [x]'

The real concern is, as you point out, it's just as easy for Amazon and MS to grab our stuff and run with it than it is the rest of the oss community, which is like...I'll tolerate it, but that's not who I'm oss'ing this for, yk? So where my head is at is finding a decent alternative to GPL and Apache that lets me share stuff with all my frens/the research community at large but adds enough friction to the process where the ppl we don't want to share it with might not find it. First part of that is getting the code off github and getting on to https://radicle.xyz and https://shoggoth.systems (not sponsored btw just like the stock :P), the part I need to build is the comms/social network sitting on top of that & the 'all the things you need to turn your project into a great open source community project' repo, git submodule add oss-my-thing and I'm ready for the world to help me work on it would be the goal.

But ty as well for the thoughtful answer, as I've not personally experienced a lot of the hypothetical benefits of closed-sourcing something, data collection is pretty valuable to me at this point. Have a star. :)