An idea for commercial support for D

[Dicebot via Digitalmars-d]

On Friday, 9 January 2015 at 12:21:35 UTC, Joakim wrote:
>> To be honest if something like this would ever happen my first 
>> move would be to reach company leadership and discuss possible 
>> full forking of D compiler as a simple matter of ensuring 
>> business safety. This scheme introduces unacceptable amount of 
>> risks for customer.
>
> I see, so some outside devs selling patches to other companies 
> poses "unacceptable" risk for your company.  Funny how such a 
> stone-age relic move seems to have such an effect on you. ;) In 
> essence, Sociomantic is already running a forked compiler, D1, 
> as it isn't publicly maintained anymore, so I'm not sure what 
> the difference is or why we should care what you do.

It poses unacceptable risk of company becoming hostage of 
ecosystem were "buying" closed patches is only way to use the 
tool effectively. In software world where even .NET goes 
open-source there is simply no reason why would one agree on such 
terms.

Right now quite some of other developers contribute to D2 
toolchain and related projects even if it is not directly used. 
It makes sense exactly because project is fully open - there is a 
good trust that such work won't get wasted and/or abused and sit 
there until its actually needed, encouraging other people to 
contribute in the meanwhile. It won't work that way with hybrid 
model.

>> Selling of software in any for is a relict of stone age and we 
>> must help it get forgotten.
>
> Funny, how does Sociomantic make money again?  Oh right, by 
> selling access to their closed-source software.  I guess 
> because it's on a server and the business logic doesn't run on 
> the customer's device, that's _completely_ different from 
> "selling of software." ;)  Or maybe Sociomantic is about to 
> open source all their code and go pure FOSS!  I look forward to 
> the announcement.

There are so many ridiculous statements here.

1) Selling services is indeed much different from selling 
software and much more honest. When you sell a program you don't 
really sell anything of value - it is just bunch of bytes that 
costs you nothing to copy. When you sell service you don't just 
sell "access" to same software running on the server but 
continuous efforts for maintaining and improving that software, 
including developer team costs and server h/w costs over time. 
This is actually something of value and charging for that is more 
widely accepted as just.

2) We don't even sell plain service access - it is more delicate 
than that, exactly to ensure that our client don't feel like 
product hostages and get encouraged to try with no big 
commitment. You can contact our sales department for more details 
;)

3) There are indeed plans for open-sourcing at least base 
libraries we use. It is taking very long because making something 
public in a way that won't hit you back is damn tricky legally 
these days and it is blocked in legal department for quite a 
while. No announcement because no idea how long may it take.

>> At the same time offering more commercial support is something 
>> very desired for business and something I'd like to see 
>> extended. Right now pretty much only available option is to 
>> reach Walter personally and agree on some contract with 
>> DigitalMars which is both limited by manpower of a single 
>> person and not advertised in any way.
>
> I have no doubt that you'd rather someone worked for you for 
> peanuts on a support contract, rather than making more money 
> off a productized D compiler.  But what you should consider is 
> the latter is likely better for D and your preferred approach 
> is not preferred by everybody else.

Yes, I am much in favor of paying for actual effort and not 
helping make money from nothing like it has happened with 
Microsoft. It both more honest from the point of view of 
commercial relations and motivates faster development by paying 
exactly for stuff that matters. With your proposed scheme best 
strategy is to hold off adding new stuff upstream as long as 
possible to force more people buy it.

You won't get customers in the long term if they feel like being 
extorted money. Your proposed scheme does exactly that.