DConf 2013 Closing Keynote: Quo Vadis by Andrei Alexandrescu

[Bill Baxter]

On Tue, Jun 25, 2013 at 2:37 PM, Joakim <joakim at airpost.net> wrote:

> 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.
>

IDEs are something you can have a freemium model for.  Core languages are
not these days.  If you have to pay to get the optimized version of the
language there are just too many other places to look that don't charge.
 You want the best version of the language to be in everyone's hands.  But
there can be some tools you have to pay for.  http://www.wingware.com/ is a
good example of a commercial Python IDE that adds value to the community
with a commercial offering.  I paid for a copy back when I was doing a lot
of python development.   It is definitely not a business I would want to be
in, though.  I was surprised to see they are still alive, actually.  Hard
to make much money selling things to developers.

--bb
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