An idea for commercial support for D

[Iain Buclaw]

On 31 January 2018 at 09:43, Joakim via Digitalmars-d
<digitalmars-d at puremagic.com> wrote:
> On Tuesday, 30 January 2018 at 19:45:51 UTC, Laeeth Isharc wrote:
>>
>> On Sunday, 4 January 2015 at 08:31:23 UTC, Joakim wrote:
>>>
>>> This is an idea I've been kicking around for a while, and given the need
>>> for commercial support for D, would perhaps work well here.
>>>
>>> [...]
>>
>>
>> By the way, in case you are interested in this path personally still, I'd
>> be willing to pay for D support, tuition, help with getting stuck, code
>> review etc for colleagues. Not for patches that aren't immediately open
>> sourced, but we fixed windows paths on DMD for example, and there might be
>> scope for occasional paid work on dmd and dub like that.  Also porting
>> headers.
>
>
> I appreciate the offer, but I'm not looking for paying work on the D
> language.  I understand the assumption most make that I'm looking to make
> money off the D language itself by pushing this commercial model, but I'm
> actually not interested in developing language-related software like
> compilers, tooling, or the standard library, even if paid for it.  I got
> stuck porting much of those D tools for Android, but it's a one-time
> excursion for me.
>
> What I'm actually interested in is using D to make commercial Android apps,
> and while I think D is a great language already, I think it could be made
> better by using this commercial model I've sketched out.  And the better D
> is, obviously the better any commercial apps I develop with it.
>
> Back when I first wrote about mixing open and closed source like this in my
> 2010 Phoronix article, nobody considered it a world-beating model.  Maybe
> people now assume I'm just keying these ideas off the success of Android in
> using a similar mixed model, but my article was published when Android had
> only single-digit market share so I hardly paid attention to it, as it was
> only one of a gaggle of mobile OS's competing at the time:
>
> https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_(operating_system)#Market_share
>
> While I had heard of a few companies using similar mixed models here and
> there, none were that successful back then, so my article was based mostly
> on theory.  I think the evidence since then has proven that theory
> resoundingly accurate, given all the huge projects, such as Android, iOS,
> Safari, Chrome, LLVM/clang, using mixed models now.  Even Microsoft, who
> used to look askance at open source, has gotten in the game, open-sourcing
> .NET and several of their other projects.
>
> In my article, I added another elaboration where even closed-source patches
> are eventually open-sourced, which I still believe to be the endgame of how
> this market eventually develops, even though AFAIK I'm still the only person
> that ever used that time-limited model on an actual project, which is
> mentioned in the article's prologue.  Such open-sourcing happens in an
> ad-hoc manner right now, where a company will develop a proprietary module
> for a mixed codebase and then eventually open-source it if they feel like
> it:
>
> http://www.brianmadden.com/opinion/Samsung-contributes-KNOX-to-Android-Open-Source-Project-Is-this-the-end-of-Android-Fragmentation
>
> My time-limited model makes sure all source is made open eventually, once
> the developers have been paid for their work.
>
> As for the other paid work you mention, I'm actually not a very experienced
> D dev, probably about intermediate level.  I did take some assembly language
> programming classes back in my college days decades ago, so I was able to
> figure out the low-level details needed to get D working on Android.
>
> I'm sure you can find much better D devs to contribute such work by posting
> bounties on the D or ldc bountysource pages:
>
> https://www.bountysource.com/teams/d
> https://www.bountysource.com/teams/ldc-developers
>

I was surprised to see a gdc bounty page.  I was even more surprised
that the one notable bounty is an issue that's either blocked by
Walter, or waiting on someone to implement array op templates in
druntume/object.d. :-)