An idea for commercial support for D

[Joakim]

On Friday, 2 February 2018 at 13:48:12 UTC, psychotic Rabbit 
wrote:
> On Friday, 2 February 2018 at 10:21:35 UTC, Joakim wrote:
>> I can't be bothered to strain through your tortured analogies 
>> that make no sense and explain to you all the ways you're 
>> wrong.  I'm respecting you enough to point out that none of 
>> your points make any sense, most would just ignore crazy 
>> analogies like this and move on, content to let you stew in 
>> this nonsense.
>
> Well, that sure is an interesting way of responding to 
> criticism.
>
> By giving up, you've made your argument ever weaker that it was 
> before.
>
> But all power to you..and you're hybrid 'ransom the open source 
> community' model ...just don't work on my projects, unless your 
> contribution is free.

When you start by calling the dominant mixed licensing model, or 
at least my twist on it, "offensive," frankly a bizzare claim, 
you don't inspire confidence that you're actually looking for a 
discussion.  However, I liked a comment you made in another 
thread about why people should use D, which showed some insight, 
so I will respond a bit.

In most any open source community today, there are people who 
volunteer contributions and those who get paid to write 
open-source or sometimes even closed-source patches, particularly 
for mixed projects like Android or llvm.  In other words, it's 
already a mix of people volunteering work for free and those 
getting paid, and we don't see the breakdown you posit.  The fact 
is that some people are fine with volunteering and most aren't, 
as the vast majority of lines of source code written is 
closed-source, so mixing the two works just fine.

As for your lawn mower analogy, the difference is you don't own 
this lawn mower, the open-source code.  It is a shared resource, 
that anybody can do what they want with, especially for the 
non-GPL code that I mentioned in my article.  So building 
proprietary modules on an OSS codebase is more like building your 
own bricks-and-mortar store on your private land alongside a 
public road, something people have been doing for millenia.  OSS 
code works much better for this than any road, because you can 
copy it a million times at basically no cost, whereas only a 
couple dozen stores can be built alongside a road.

And what we find is that when you allow such mixing with 
permissively-licensed projects (that the GPL makes much more 
difficult), as we see with those using mixed models in the 
popular permissively-licensed projects I mentioned above, you can 
fund a _lot_ more development even on the OSS core, which is why 
Android is now the dominant operating system on the planet.

This experiment has been run over the last decade: mixed models 
have won.  That is why I think D should follow suit, leading such 
mixed use for programming languages too.