D's open source approach

[Joakim]

I just stumbled across an 18-year old essay, by an economist and 
one-time tech entrepreneur written during the dot.com boom, about 
open source and its properties, and this paragraph particularly 
reminded me of D, especially the bit about the mailing list which 
we're anachronistically still using:

"With 'open source' software, the only user with any influence is 
a user with the 'right stuff' to go into the code and enhance the 
software. As an 'open source' developer, you never have to attend 
meetings with corporate suits. Instead, your only communication 
is with an elite mailing list of co-developers. You don’t have to 
worry about having focus groups test the usability of your 
software. Your users are gear-heads who think that escape 
sequences constitute an intuitive interface. You don’t have to 
worry about a marketing department spoiling the elegance of your 
design by promising features that you did not anticipate."

Read the whole thing, it's worth it:

http://arnoldkling.com/~arnoldsk/aimst2/aimst205.html

Some of his predictions in the essay are wrong, but only because 
he expected end users to run web servers one day or didn't 
anticipate browsers becoming part of the OS bundle: his 
fundamental reasoning is mostly correct.

Of course, I agree with his conclusion that open source will 
always have to coexist with proprietary source, especially given 
that I have proposed a way to mix the two:

http://forum.dlang.org/thread/okuzksqzczprvuklpzaw@forum.dlang.org

Note that the above quote is not necessarily meant as damning the 
D process, as there are real advantages to not having to deal 
with the marketing department.  But there are also disadvantages, 
ie there are both pros and cons.  The D core team has to realize 
that they're operating in a bubble with their open source process.

The only way that D devs know that the setup process is not 
working well is when some noob opens a forum thread to complain:

http://forum.dlang.org/thread/fomwalvifzprjneswrcv@forum.dlang.org

I haven't used Windows or any other desktop device/OS in years, 
so I wouldn't know what problems they're having.  The usual math 
in these situations is that 10-20 users simply drop the tech and 
run away for the one who complains.

By the reasoning in the essay, I don't expect this to be solved 
for free: the solution is for the devs behind the IDEs, Visual 
Studio, DlangIDE, etc., to charge money for a streamlined 
process. Why hasn't this happened yet?

There are such commercial support options for every other major 
OSS language, someone will have to do this for D at some point 
for it to take the next step.