Comment by dfabulich

> The plan is however to open source when Orion is self-sufficient (business model of Orion is you are the customer and can pay for it - like we used to pay for browsers 20 years ago before advertisers started paying for our browsing), meaning it can sustain its own development independent of Kagi Search.

Orion will never reach "self-sufficiency" as long as you don't actually charge for Orion. Orion is completely free to use. I can donate to Orion+, but Orion+ offers no paid features; it's basically a Patreon. https://help.kagi.com/orion/orion-plus/orion-plus.html

(No major browser has ever sustained its own development independent of a search engine's funding, not even Netscape, which charged $40/seat in the 1990s, with a free "shareware" tier so generous that hardly anyone paid. Netscape was funded by advertising, especially from Yahoo search. Funding browser development entirely on donations to a commercial business would be completely unprecedented.)

What if, instead, you made Orion "source available" to paying customers, but not open source? You could merge PRs only from users who sign a CLA. (Users would file PRs out of charity, for the same reason they sign up for Orion+ today.)