DConf 2013 Closing Keynote: Quo Vadis by Andrei Alexandrescu

[Joseph Rushton Wakeling]

On Tuesday, 25 June 2013 at 21:38:01 UTC, Joakim wrote:
> 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.

Obviously I can't speak for the core developers, or even for the 
community as a group.  But I can make the following observations.

D's success as a language is _entirely_ down to volunteer effort 
-- as Walter highlighted in his keynote.  Volunteer effort is 
responsible for the development of the compiler frontend, the 
runtime, and the standard library.  Volunteers have put in the 
hard work of porting these to other compiler backends.  
Volunteers have made and reviewed language improvement proposals, 
and have been vigilant in reporting and resolving bugs.  
Volunteers also contribute to vibrant discussions on these very 
forums, providing support and advice to those in need of help.  
And many of these volunteers have been doing so over the course 
of years.

Now, in trying to drive more funding and professional effort 
towards D development, do you _really_ think that the right thing 
to do is to turn around to all those people and say: "Hey guys, 
after all the work you put in to make D so great, now we're going 
to build on that, but you'll have to wait 6 months for the extra 
goodies unless you pay"?

How do you think that will affect the motivation of all those 
volunteers -- the code contributors, the bug reporters, the forum 
participants?  What could you say to the maintainers of GDC or 
LDC, after all they've done to enable people to use the language, 
that could justify denying their compilers up-to-date access to 
the latest features?  How would it affect the atmosphere of 
discussion about language development -- compared to the current 
friendly, collegial approach?

... and -- how do you think it would affect uptake, if it was 
announced that access to the best features would come at a price? 
  There are orders of magnitude of difference between uptake of 
free and non-free services no matter what the domain, and 
software is one where free (as in freedom and beer) is much more 
strongly desired than in many other fields.

> 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.

There's a big difference between introducing commercial models 
with a greater degree of paid professional work, and introducing 
closed components.  Red Hat is a good example of that -- I can 
get, legally and for free, a fully functional copy of Red Hat 
Enterprise Linux without paying a penny.  It's just missing the 
Red Hat name and logos and the support contract.

In another email you mentioned Microsoft's revenues from Visual 
Studio but -- leaving aside for a moment all the moral and 
strategic concerns of closing things up -- Visual Studio enjoys 
that success because it's a virtually essential tool for 
professional development on Microsoft Windows, which still has an 
effective monopoly on modern desktop computing.  Microsoft has 
the market presence to be able to dictate terms like that -- no 
one else does.  Certainly no upcoming programming language could 
operate like that!

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

It's more likely that closing off parts of the offering would 
limit that uptake, for reasons already given.  On the other hand, 
with more and more organizations coming to use and rely on D, 
there are plenty of other ways professional development could be 
brought in.  Just to take one example: companies with a 
mission-critical interest in D have a corresponding interest in 
their developers giving time to the language itself.  How many 
such companies do you think there need to be before D has a 
stable of skilled professional developers being paid explicitly 
to maintain and develop the language?

Your citation of the Linux kernel is relevant here.  Do you think 
that Linux would have had all that diverse success if parts of it 
had been closed up and sold at a premium?  D's status as a purely 
community-run project is an asset compared to corporate-backed 
languages, not a liability.