Ask HN: Founding a Foundation (or Not)

The gist: MIT licensed project, originally made for a still ongoing publicly funded research project, went wild and attracted a lot of attention & started getting some traction[0], with big names from the industry[1] coming on board and implementing my software in their workflows (link in profile). I'm now at a crossroad of choosing and setting out the direction of this endeavour: a for profit or non-profit foundation/org of some sorts, or both.

The dilemma: I think a non-profit most probably will not be able to absorb/attract enough funds to properly finance development, or it will come at a big organisational/political overhead (many small contributions, with high entitlement). A for profit entity may alienate the goodwill gathered so far and pressure fast profits, whereas my industry[1] is a conservative, stingy, legally-scared bunch that don't react well to sudden movements, though are more than happy with "slow and steady" change that they can own[2] first.

What to do? Where to look for advice? What's the best way for forward?

Appendix: The project is successful because:

- part of the research problem required operating at scale, therefore it's not really write-once, run-once (to the best of my amateurish abilities).

- it's partly a political solution, not just technical. My industry has no significant OSS that it can rely on, using on mostly 1000/yr licensed software developed by a few big companies that strive to rope in more of their data & money.

[0] Traction = 200+ strong slack group that's rather active; interest, contributions & in-house implementations coming in from some of the biggest names in my industry (see [1] below). [1] Industry = AEC, or architecture, engineering and construction [2] Own = understand, grok, and potentially not pay for, etc.