> Everything I do is driven by a single goal: to make my startup successful so I can innovate in edtech. Nothing else.
I believe you entirely. That comes across in everything you say. Huge harm has been done in education precisely by people with similarly amoral motivation. History of education is filled with case after case of amoral motivations leading to immoral behavior.
Other industries have this more extreme. Fritz Haber is a biography worth reading.
The comments you're making aren't very honest -- I suspect with yourself more than with anyone else. For example:
> Maintaining an open-source project requires significant time and effort.
No. It doesn't. You need to flip the "public" bit on github and post a "caveat emptor" shingle. The effort you're cloning -- manim -- did exactly that. The result was a synergistic, friendly, manim-ce.
And the author has been able to work full-time in this space, his entire career, without doing anything evil, unethical, harmful, or unpleasant, and strictly advancing the world.
You're competing -- rather than cooperating -- with folks like him.
> I simply need enough protected space to innovate competitively and give the company the best chance to succeed.
You don't seem to understand how this works. A few points:
- Education is a highly-regulated industry for good reasons (student harm, societal harm, privacy risks, etc.), and education research goes through IRBs for similar reasons.
- Startups can work on IP, but usually -- and especially in education -- networks, connections, support, etc. are more important. It's hard to build an IP moat.
- Startups have a 95% failure rate. I'd give this one more than that.
A few corollaries:
a) With the current model, you'll have a hard time building partnerships with the people you need, and indeed, people (myself included!) will be rooting for you to fail. That weakens, not strengthens, your odds of success.
b) An example of another way to accomplish your stated goal is a five-year research grant, or a position which supports doing this kind of work (e.g. instructional staff at your university). Those have >> 5% success rates.
c) Open business models aren't less likely to be successful here than closed ones. Red Hat sold for $34B.
Otherwise, my best wish for you is to fail fast, and to learn a lot from the process.