DConf 2013 Closing Keynote: Quo Vadis by Andrei Alexandrescu

[Joakim]

Just finished watching Andrei's talk, it was up to his usual high 
standard.

I found the bits about professionalism a bit weird though: can we 
really expect that from a volunteer effort?  I'm pretty sure the 
A/V guys at the conference weren't volunteers, ie they were paid.

Along the line that QAston started, if you want more 
professionalism, is there any interest in producing a commercial 
D compiler?  If not, why not?  I notice that Walter sells C and 
C++ compilers and source on digitalmars.com, but strangely not D. 
  There are interesting business/source models nowadays where you 
can be mostly open source and still sell a commercial product.

For example, Walter has often talked about optimizations in the 
compiler that he'd like to get to.  There could be two compilers: 
one where the source is fully publicly available, another made 
available to paying users, which has additional optimizations 
done either by Walter or others who he supervises, but the source 
for those optimizations would not be available publicly, though 
perhaps made available only to the buyers under a non-OSS 
license.  After enough time has passed for the optimization work 
to be paid for, the optimization patches would eventually be 
merged into the slower, non-paid version.  Android uses a similar 
hybrid model, which has obviously been enormously successful.

Another possibility is a bounty system, where users pledge money 
towards needed features or bug fixes.  It'd basically be a more 
distributed version of the hybrid approach I've outlined.

I wonder what the response would be to injecting some money and 
commercialism into the D ecosystem.