Is D not-for-profit or not?!

[retard]

Sun, 30 Jan 2011 09:06:57 -0500, Heywood Floyd wrote:

> Jeff Nowakowski Wrote:
> 
>> There's nothing wrong with being in it for money, but it would be nice
>> to know up front and in what manner.
> 
> 
> I've been meaning to ask, and I'll just take this oppurtunity, and it
> relates to what Jeff just said:
> 
> If one would like to donate money to D, how would one do that? Would it
> even make any sense? Or be needed?
> 
> And this naturally raises the question: Who/what owns D? Is it a
> non-profit, a group of people, or a business? And regardless of who owns
> D, is there any D-only organisation that one could support, financially?
> I'm not demanding an answer, I'm just sharing my thoughts.
> 
> I mean, it would feel weird to donate money to Digital Mars, a
> for-profit company, that does all kinds of things, including C++, right?
> If I was to feel confident in donating it would have to be to some sort
> of formally founded non-profit legal body with some sort of constitution
> like "to further the development of D" or something. I don't know how
> these things work. I guess right now D is too small and the legal cost
> of just maintaining such an organisation would surpass any donations
> anyway.

D is basically Walter's language. He decides what goes in and how stuff 
works. People who live nearby are somewhat able to influence the process.

So far it doesn't look like any earmarked money has been used to buy 
specific features. For example I doubt that even if you donate one 
million USD, they won't rename the keywords or __traits into something 
readable or add built-in first class tuples. I also doubt you can make 
the dmc/dmd backend FOSS with any sum of money. If you wanted some 
changes badly, I'd recommend donating the money to some democratic 
community language without any BDFL persons. 

I once saw that money has been used to support dsource / tango 
development. Phobos OTOH is Andrei's child. I bet he earns at least 
$20000 per month at facebook so you would need to be extremely rich to 
persuade him or give something useful in return such as free time.