Is D not-for-profit or not?!

Andrei Alexandrescu SeeWebsiteForEmail at erdani.org
Sun Jan 30 08:55:28 PST 2011


On 01/30/2011 08:27 AM, retard wrote:
> 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.

This is a meritocracy: people who are good will exert an influence on 
the language and its standard library. Don is an incredibly strong 
contributor and he's living in Europe; I've only seen him once in my 
life. If Don had language design as a focus, I'm sure he would very 
strongly influence the definition of the language. This is because he is 
talented, competent, and motivated. Steve is in New York City. I don't 
know where other strong contributors are, but definitely they help shape 
the language.

> 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.

That would take someone rich and incredibly petty. It's not, however, 
impossible that a corporation would seriously consider adoption of the 
language but would have a specific need that needs be met as a 
prerequisite. Such things happened with things like ABIs, interfacing 
with other languages and systems, specific libraries, certain 
optimizations etc.

> 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 think that's just false. With money the backend could be bought from 
Symantec.


Andrei


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