An idea for commercial support for D

[uri via Digitalmars-d]

Hi,

Your business model is flawed for a number of reasons. Firstly, 
companies make money from their own products, not paying staff to 
figure out which bug fixes/features to cherry pick for the tool 
chain.

Secondly, no one makes money by locking out others when they 
themselves can be locked out in the same manner. This is 
basically what your model seems to boil down to.

Party 'A' provides patches X,Y,Z in the compiler and others have 
to pay for them. Party 'B' provides patches M,N,O and similarly, 
others pay for them.  Now party A does not benefit from M,N,O 
unless they pay for it and party B does not benefit from X,Y,Z 
unless they pay for it. So no one wins.

So the best solution is A and B both open their patches and both 
benefit from all contributions.

Thirdly, how can one separate the features? For example, say I'm 
willing to pay for features X,Y,Z but not M,N,O. How do the D 
devs split the features out so I only get M,N,O? Separate and 
special builds for each paying customer?

Fourthly, what about the OSS people using D?  Are the X,Y,Z and 
M,N,O features released GPL so they can benefit immediately or do 
they wait 6 months?

If it's 6 months why would anyone pay for the features? If it's 
longer than 6 months, or even if its GPL I think most will 
abandon D and go to Nim or Rust.


Cheers,
uri