An idea for commercial support for D

[Joakim via Digitalmars-d]

On Tuesday, 6 January 2015 at 22:37:40 UTC, anonymous wrote:
> On Tuesday, 6 January 2015 at 19:46:51 UTC, Joakim wrote:
>> On Tuesday, 6 January 2015 at 19:06:27 UTC, anonymous wrote:
> [...]
>> I don't know of any commercial support model where you only 
>> pay for the fixes you need at any given moment and the fixes 
>> that others paid for are provided to you for free.
>
> I'm not knowledgeable about any of this business stuff, and I 
> don't mean to pretend I am. I just wanted to clarify what I 
> think Joseph meant there, as I understood it.
>
> As far as I know there are companies that employ developers to 
> work on open source software, with their patches open-sourced 
> immediately. I'm assuming the employer can direct where exactly 
> the effort goes. That's essentially it, no?

A few companies may do that, but he referred to paying for fixes 
you want right away but getting patches other companies paid for 
for free.  I don't know of any commercial support model where 
that happens.

>> I presume you're referring to support subscriptions, where you 
>> pay a monthly fee to subscribe to an stream of ongoing fixes 
>> and pay extra for fixes you need right away.  But that's not 
>> "free," you're paying a monthly fee for that ongoing 
>> subscription, which subsidizes the cost of those fixes that 
>> others paid for first.
>
> No, I didn't have that in mind.

Well, unless either of you can articulate exactly what model you 
have in mind and who's using it, it's irrelevant.

> [...]
>> My point was that he's wrong that the patch's value doesn't 
>> change if others have access to it.  Just because that patch 
>> doesn't clearly differentiate your product on a spec sheet 
>> doesn't mean those patches in aggregate don't differentiate 
>> your time to market and cost of making the product, which will 
>> all affect your bottom line.
>
> So, the point is that competitors can't leech off my paid 
> patches, right? I mean, sure, that's a thing. I'm definitely 
> not business enough to put a number on it. Seems like the 
> number you put on it is higher than the one Joseph puts on it.

Yes, _anything_ you pay for is a competitive advantage for you.  
He seems to think only the direct features of your product are 
your competitive advantage, but indirect costs like this also 
affect the price and overall quality of your product, at least 
relative to other products in the market, which are just as 
important.

>> There is no disadvantage to paying for the patch in this 
>> model, because otherwise you don't get the patch.  You are 
>> paying someone to write the patch so that it exists in the 
>> first place.  Otherwise, you can hope that some OSS dev gets 
>> to it someday when he gets some spare time.
>
> The counter-proposal is not to rely on the free (as in beer) 
> devs, but to hire someone to write OSS patches. This would of 
> course allow your competition to leech off of you. But if 
> others do the same, the benefits may be greater than if 
> everyone is protective of their stuff. Again, I don't want to 
> pretend to know what's best business-wise.

Businesses generally don't sink money into stuff that provides 
them no competitive advantage.  Therefore, the counter-proposal 
is pure fantasy.

> [...]
>> It _is_ win-win, that's the whole point.  It's even 
>> win-win-win, to crib a term from The Office, ;) because the 
>> OSS project eventually also gets the patch after a delay.
>
> I don't think the "win" for the customer is so clear. The "win" 
> that your competitors have to pay, too, seems rather slim to me 
> (remember, not a business guy). And if competitors would buy 
> patches collectively, eliminating the need for an exclusive 
> access period, they could be better off than when each of them 
> pays for it separately. But this may not be realistic, of 
> course.

The win for the customer is that they're getting a patch that 
would not otherwise exist, not sure what's more clear than that.  
As for competitors, let's say you pay for a bunch of patches 
which you open-source right away and your competitors use those, 
then don't pay for any patches of their own.  So they save a 
bunch of money that you're spending, then release their product 
cheaper than yours.  Which company do you think is going to do 
better?

I'm not sure exactly what you by mean by competitors buying 
patches collectively.  If you mean that all the companies pool 
together and fund OSS development, how do you keep some outlier 
from not contributing any money, using the resulting OSS code, 
then undercutting you on price?  It is difficult to coordinate 
companies this way, though I have sometimes pointed out 
non-profits like Linaro, which are funded by various companies 
and do something similar.  What I think you're describing is 
possible, but can never garner as much investment as a paid 
business model.

>> I don't know who this hypothetical competitor is who provides 
>> "immediate-access-for-everyone" and is cranking out a ton of 
>> patches.  They currently don't exist.
>
> Neither exists at the moment for D. It's all hypothetical.

Right, but the hybrid model exists elsewhere and is highly 
successful.  His preferred alternative doesn't really exist, at 
least he certainly hasn't listed anybody, and to the extent it 
does, is _significantly_ less successful.

>> Even if some of the existing OSS devs wrote some paid patches, 
>> the D OSS project exists because of the generosity of Walter, 
>> Andrei, Kenji, and a couple dozen other volunteer contributors 
>> who give away their work for free under an OSS license.  To 
>> suggest that they are therefore bound to always provide future 
>> patches for free is frankly ridiculous.  They could all just 
>> stop working on D tomorrow, they have no responsibility to 
>> keep providing all this free work.
>>
>> Similarly, they have no responsibility to not sell some 
>> patches to paying customers, simply because some spoiled 
>> handful will throw a hissy fit because they're not getting 
>> _everything_ for free anymore.  If they really want those 
>> patches, they can pay for them or write them themselves.
>
> It's not so much about responsibilites, definitely not legal 
> ones. It's more about keeping good relations with the 
> community. I'm also thinking more about minor/occasional 
> contributors, like myself, not so much about pure consumers (or 
> potential contributors ;) ). Right now, D is communism as usual 
> in OSS. If we switch over to capitalism, that doesn't attract 
> the same crowd, and may push away the current one.

OSS is not communism, it's volunteerism, and to the extent that 
companies like Facebook and Sociomantic are already using it, 
it's already got some capitalism.  I don't know what the 
minor/occasional contributors think, so who knows how they'd 
react to such a move, but D could well afford to lose them if it 
gets several paid devs and some new OSS contributors from the 
resulting larger D community in return. :) The cost-benefit on 
that is a no-brainer, you have to go paid.

> But if a third party starts selling patches, and merges them 
> into D proper after some time, I think that's a whole different 
> story. They didn't write the bugs they're fixing. And they 
> can't let down a community in which they haven't been active. 
> It could still mean that "open D" becomes second class. And 
> that could throw existing contributors off. But I see much less 
> friction than when current core developers started doing it.

Since no core dev has expressed any interest in this thread, that 
is the likely route.  But even if they did, no other member of 
the D community has any claim on their time.  Their contributions 
to D are donations of their time.  For a member of the D 
community to say they can't also sell some of their D-related 
time to willing buyers is utter nonsense.