An idea for commercial support for D

[anonymous via Digitalmars-d]

On Friday, 9 January 2015 at 06:43:01 UTC, Joakim wrote:
> On Tuesday, 6 January 2015 at 22:37:40 UTC, anonymous wrote:
[...]
>> 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.

When two companies hire two different guys to work on the same 
OSS project, each company pays for the patches of their guy, 
while getting the patches of the other guy for free.

For example, I just googled "paid linux developers" and came 
across an article [1] that states:
"Within that field Red Hat topped that chart with 12% followed by 
Inte with 8% IBM and Novell with 6% each and Oracle 3%. Despite 
the clear commercial rivalry between those players central kernel 
development worked well Corbet noted."

Now it might be that they hold back patches for some time to gain 
an advantage over the competition. But it's my uneducated 
impression that they don't.

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

I would have guessed that business is happy to invest when the 
return is right. Business wouldn't say no to making more money 
just because someone else makes more money, too, would they? Of 
course, strategic considerations have to be factored in there. 
Like harming or benefitting a competitor. But also brand image 
and whatever else.

[...]
> 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.

Sure, but this is all about how it's a bigger win than 
open-sourcing the patch right away.

[...]
> 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?

I assumed that the competitors know each other. That would make 
it an all-or-none deal. And the obvious choice would be to split 
the cost. When there may be serious unkown competition, it 
becomes unfeasible, I guess.

[...]
> 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.

The 'if' is the thing. Lose too many volunteers while attracting 
not enough business and whoops you're going in the wrong 
direction.

Also, personally I like volunteerism. But that's just me.

[...]
> 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.

Again, it's not that anyone has any right to make demands of 
anyone. Of course, anyone can start their own closed fork of D 
[2]. But, depending on a thousand details, if the right/wrong 
people do it, it may hurt the popularity of D.

Similarly, if Walter proclaimed that D was a big mistake and that 
he favours Go or Rust or whatever now, no one has any right to 
demand he keeps working on D, but it would probably be a bad move 
for the popularity of D.

[1] http://apcmag.com/linux-now-75-corporate.htm
[2] As far as the involved licences allow for that. Not a lawyer. 
Not legal advice. etc. yadda yadda