An idea for commercial support for D

[Joakim via Digitalmars-d]

This is an idea I've been kicking around for a while, and given 
the need for commercial support for D, would perhaps work well 
here.

The notion is that individual developers could work on patches to 
fix bugs or add features to ldc/druntime/phobos then sell those 
closed patches to paying customers.  After enough time has 
passed, so that sufficient customers have adequately paid for the 
work or after a set time limit beyond that, the patch is open 
sourced and merged back upstream.  It would have to be ldc and 
not dmd, as the dmd backend is not open source and the gdc 
backend license doesn't allow such closed patches.

This works better than bounties because it avoids the "tragedy of 
the commons" problem inherent to open source and bounties, ie any 
user can just wait for some other contributor or any potential 
individual paying customer has an incentive to wait and let 
somebody else pay a bounty, then use the resulting work for free 
right away.  With this approach, non-paying users only get the 
resulting paid work after the work has been paid for and perhaps 
an additional delay after that.

Two big benefits come out of this approach.  Obviously, this 
would provide commercial support for paying customers, but the 
other big benefit is that it doesn't depend on some company 
providing that support.  A decentralized group of devs could work 
on and get paid for these individual patches on their own, 
without having to get together and start a company.

I'm writing about this idea to see how much interest there is 
from D developers for doing such paid work and from paying 
customers to pay for such work.  For those who believe this isn't 
part of the open source aspect of D, it isn't.  This doesn't have 
to be a part of the D open source project, even if the work 
ultimately often ends up back in the official github repos, after 
a delay.

I believe this is the needed step to turn the D community from a 
tribe into an organization, as Andrei said recently.  More 
rationale about this hybrid licensing model can be found in this 
article I wrote almost five years ago:

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=sprewell_licensing