An idea for commercial support for D

[Daniel Murphy via Digitalmars-d]

"Joseph Rushton Wakeling via Digitalmars-d"  wrote in message 
news:mailman.4177.1420498284.9932.digitalmars-d at puremagic.com...


> > A company is not going to just write a bunch of patches and open source 
> > all of
> > them unless they have some complementary business model to go with it, 
> > whether
> > google making more mobile revenue off Android or Apple providing clang 
> > as the
> > system compiler on OS X and making money off the bundled Mac.

> However, I don't see it making any sense for a company to invest in 
> proprietary patches to a toolchain, because 99% of the time, when you need 
> a patch written, it's a bugfix.  And when you want a bugfix, you don't 
> want a patch that applies only to your version of the toolchain and which 
> you (or your friendly proprietary-patch-writing consultant) have to keep 
> rebasing on top of upstream for the next 6 months -- you want upstream 
> fixed.  Otherwise you'll wind up paying far more merely for maintenance of 
> your proprietary extensions, than you would have just to get someone to 
> write a patch and get it straight into the open-source upstream.

This is very important - upstreaming your patches means that the community 
will maintain them for you.  This is why it's useful for a company to 
develop their own patches and still contribute back upstream.