Background A nasty surprise Last summer while trying to deliver a feature for one of our customers, I encountered a nasty situation. The software we were developing, depended on a production grade license of Gurobi . People were on vacations except of my team and some unrelated staff, so developing the feature was in principle blocked. As I learnt due to some other situations, research stuff being participating in conferences, they could not update the license. These are the people who had the final saying. Still the situation for me was very uncomfortable, because this feature would be delayed a lot. Months before I had cautioned that the sole dependency on a closed source solution was a bad practice when there were free open source solutions like HiGHS . Gurobi is the leading player in the field with a very performant product that offers many conveniences. Actually, much more performant than the open source solutions in our case.…