ANNOUNCEMENT: GNU-D opens up shop

[Gabe McArthur]

>ach ... I thought perhaps you were serious about helping for a moment.
>
>Have a trout ... courtesy of dsource.org :)

Realize this: dsource is a collection of disparate tools and vague/nebulous
repositories.  I'm talking about conformity and organization.  Standardized
libraries.  A compiler that works in conjunction with other tools.  A debugger
(GDB).  Everything can be organized as one cohesive whole.  This is so that as
the libraries grow and the compiler becomes better, the threshold for people
everywhere to work with D becomes lower.  Further, it will work off a standard
development model, where the community can move and contribute much more quickly
than any one person.  Walter is a great guy with a fantastic vision, but he's
just one man, and his output can't really compete with a group of organized
volunteers.

As to the corporate angle, that's why the libraries should be liscensed under
the LGPL, as that permit commercial code to link to the libraries without
necessarily forcing them to disperse their own code.  Take a look at Mono for
crying out loud.  Their runtime and compiler are both GPL.  And that's not even
necessarily to say that all libraries MUST be LGPL.  The community can decide as
to whether we can let other compatable liscenses into the mix (perhaps the MIT
or BSD liscenses).

Besides, until big time companies actually have a working collection of tools
and a coherent library, getting corporate backing seems somewhat moot.  Look at
the Linux kernel -- we have absolutely no conception of how much corporate money
goes into the kernel every year (it's on the order of 10's of millions, to be
sure), and they don't seem to have huge concerns about contributing back to the
community -- if they did, the kernel wouldn't have grown as it has!