Lost a new commercial user this week :(

[Joakim via Digitalmars-d]

On Monday, 29 December 2014 at 15:18:57 UTC, Gary Willoughby 
wrote:
> This is probably the most disgusting, selfish and deluded posts 
> i've read on this entire newsgroup.
>
> If D is supposed to supplant C/C++, then the needs of those 
> users *must* be met, especially without deriding those very 
> users. Just because you work on the D ecosystem does not give 
> you 'carte blanche' to tell a user to stop making enquiries 
> into features that are promised by D.
>
> The user is the entire goal of D! Forgetting this relegates D 
> to obscurity and makes you look like an ass.
>
>> No, not really. Open source is about people working to fulfill 
>> their own personal goals and not minding to share resulting 
>> code if it doesn't mean much added effort. Only few care about 
>> things like long-term success and only tiny minority will be 
>> interested in working on ecosystem they don't use.
>
> With that paragraph, you've just dumped on Walter, Andrei's and 
> all other open source contributor's efforts for the past n 
> years!

I strongly disagree.  Dicebot's post is completely true, 
describing exactly how open source projects actually work, 
instead of some idealized notion of "Open source it and they will 
come!"  I think some people have unrealistic expectations of open 
source after the success of past large projects like the linux 
kernel, gcc, clang, Qt, etc., all of which had heavy commercial 
support from IBM, Red Hat, Apple, Trolltech/Nokia and so on.  D 
has not reached that stage of commercial support yet, so the 
expectation that good Windows tooling and support will just 
magically appear is unrealistic, particularly for free.

You are right that the user's needs will ultimately have to be 
met for D to ever take off to the next level, but I don't recall 
anyone ever "promising" a good Windows debugging experience, docs 
that you can learn the language from, or widespread Windows 
support for D libraries.  D is a community project: Manu can note 
those deficiencies, but as Dicebot said, unless someone wants to 
work on them or like-minded users pay for someone to do it, the 
community will generally not just do what he wants.

Saying that Dicebot's valid point, that everybody has different 
goals from open source and most only care about their narrow use 
case, is dumping on Walter and Andrei's efforts is going off the 
deep end a bit.  I'm sure they are very aware of this reality, 
and are thankful for the few steady contributors they have.