On Tuesday, 25 June 2013 at 20:58:16 UTC, Joseph Rushton Wakeling
wrote:
I wonder what the response would be to injecting some money
and commercialism into the D ecosystem.
Given how D's whole success stems from its community, I think
an "open core" model (even with time-lapse) would be
disastrous. It'd be like kicking everyone in the teeth after
all the work they put in.
I don't know the views of the key contributors, but I wonder if
they would have such a knee-jerk reaction against any paid/closed
work. The current situation would seem much more of a kick in
the teeth to me: spending time trying to be "professional," as
Andrei asks, and producing a viable, stable product used by a
million developers, corporate users included, but never receiving
any compensation for this great tool you've poured effort into,
that your users are presumably often making money with.
I understand that such a shift from being mostly OSS to having
some closed components can be tricky, but that depends on the
particular community. I don't think any OSS project has ever
become popular without having some sort of commercial model
attached to it. C++ would be nowhere without commercial
compilers; linux would be unheard of without IBM and Red Hat
figuring out a consulting/support model around it; and Android
would not have put the linux kernel on hundreds of millions of
computing devices without the hybrid model that Google employed,
where they provide an open source core, paid for through
increased ad revenue from Android devices, and the hardware
vendors provide closed hardware drivers and UI skins on top of
the OSS core.
This talk prominently mentioned scaling to a million users and
being professional: going commercial is the only way to get there.
