An idea for commercial support for D

[Joakim]

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 now see you posted some recurring funding on that first page, 
would be better if you allocated it to issues you actually need, 
as I'm not sure how such recurring funding is even allocated.

You may need to cross-post the backed issues here in the forum 
once in a while to publicize them, as I don't think many are 
aware that those bounties even exist, as we don't link them on 
the front page like some other languages do.