DConf 2013 Closing Keynote: Quo Vadis by Andrei Alexandrescu

Joakim joakim at airpost.net
Tue Jun 25 14:37:56 PDT 2013


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.


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