DConf 2013 Closing Keynote: Quo Vadis by Andrei Alexandrescu

[Leandro Lucarella]

Joakim, el 25 de June a las 23:37 me escribiste:
> 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.

Against being paid no, against being closed YES. Please don't even think
about it. It was a hell of a ride trying to make D more open to step
back now. What we need is companies paying to people to improve the
compiler and toolchain. This is slowly starting to happen, in
Sociomantic we are already 2 people dedicating some time to improve D as
part of our job (Don and me).

We need more of this, and to get this, we need companies to start using
D, and to get this, we need professionalism (I agree 100% with Andrei on
this one). Is a bootstrap effort, and is not like volunteers need more
time to be professional, is just that you have to want to make the jump.
I think is way better to do less stuff but with higher quality, nobody
is asking people for more time, is just changing the focus a bit, at
least for some time. Again, this is only bootstrapping, and is always
hard and painful. We need to make the jump to make companies comfortable
using D, then things will start rolling by themselves.

> 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.

First of all, your examples are completely wrong. The projects you are
mentioning are 100% free, with no closed components (except for
components done by third-party). Your examples are just reinforcing what
I say above. Linux is completely GPL, so it's not even only open source.
Is Free Software, meaning the license if more restrictive than, for
example, phobos. This means is harder to adopt by companies and you
can't possibly change it in a closed way if you want to distribute
a binary. Same for C++, which is not a project, is a standards, but the
most successful and widespread compiler, GCC, not only is free, is the
battle horse of free software, of the GNU project and created by the
most extremist free software advocate ever. Android might be the only
valid case (but I'm not really familiar with Android model), but the
kernel, since is based on Linux, has to have the source code when
released. Maybe the drivers are closed source.

You are missing more closely related projects, like Python, Haskel,
Ruby, Perl, and probably 90% of the newish programming languages, which
are all 100% open source. And very successful I might say. The key is
always breaking into the corporate ground and make those corporations
contribute.

There are valid examples of project using hybrid models but they are
usually software as a service models, not very applicable to
a compiler/language, like Wordpress, or other web applications. Other
valid examples are MySQL, or QT I think used an hybrid model at least
once. Lots of them died and were resurrected as 100% free projects, like
StarOffice -> OpenOffice -> LibreOffice.

And finally making the *optimizer* (or some optimizations) closed will
be hardly a good business, being that there are 2 other backends out
there that usually kicks DMD backend ass already, so people needing more
speed will probably just switch to gdc or ldc.

> This talk prominently mentioned scaling to a million users and being
> professional: going commercial is the only way to get there.

As in breaking into the commercial world? Then agreed. If you imply
commercial == closing some parts of the source, then I think you are WAY
OFF.

-- 
Leandro Lucarella (AKA luca)                     http://llucax.com.ar/
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