On 2013-06-26 00:55, Aleksandar Ruzicic wrote:

> There is no need for designer to know what DDOC is. For the past few
> years I have worked with many designers which had only basic knowledge
> about HTML and even less about CSS (most of them don't know anything
> about JavaScript but they "know jQuery a bit"). They just give me PSD
> and I do slicing and all coding.

Again, "web designer" was not the correct word(s). Something more like web developer/frontend developer, who ever writes the final format.

> So if any redesign of dlang.org is going to happen I volunteer to do all
> coding, so there is no need to look for designer which is comfortable
> writing DDOC.

Ok, good.

-- 
/Jacob Carlborg

Joakim, el 25 de June a las 23:37 me escribiste:
> On Tuesday, 25 June 2013 at 20:58:16 UTC, Joseph Rushton Wakeling wrote:
> >>I wonder what the response would be to injecting some money and commercialism into the D ecosystem.
> >
> >Given how D's whole success stems from its community, I think an "open core" model (even with time-lapse) would be disastrous. It'd be like kicking everyone in the teeth after all the work they put in.
> I don't know the views of the key contributors, but I wonder if they would have such a knee-jerk reaction against any paid/closed work.

Against being paid no, against being closed YES. Please don't even think about it. It was a hell of a ride trying to make D more open to step back now. What we need is companies paying to people to improve the compiler and toolchain. This is slowly starting to happen, in Sociomantic we are already 2 people dedicating some time to improve D as part of our job (Don and me).

We need more of this, and to get this, we need companies to start using D, and to get this, we need professionalism (I agree 100% with Andrei on this one). Is a bootstrap effort, and is not like volunteers need more time to be professional, is just that you have to want to make the jump. I think is way better to do less stuff but with higher quality, nobody is asking people for more time, is just changing the focus a bit, at least for some time. Again, this is only bootstrapping, and is always hard and painful. We need to make the jump to make companies comfortable using D, then things will start rolling by themselves.

> The current situation would seem much more of a kick in the teeth to me: spending time trying to be "professional," as Andrei asks, and producing a viable, stable product used by a million developers, corporate users included, but never receiving any compensation for this great tool you've poured effort into, that your users are presumably often making money with.
> 
> I understand that such a shift from being mostly OSS to having some closed components can be tricky, but that depends on the particular community.  I don't think any OSS project has ever become popular without having some sort of commercial model attached to it.  C++ would be nowhere without commercial compilers; linux would be unheard of without IBM and Red Hat figuring out a consulting/support model around it; and Android would not have put the linux kernel on hundreds of millions of computing devices without the hybrid model that Google employed, where they provide an open source core, paid for through increased ad revenue from Android devices, and the hardware vendors provide closed hardware drivers and UI skins on top of the OSS core.

First of all, your examples are completely wrong. The projects you are
mentioning are 100% free, with no closed components (except for
components done by third-party). Your examples are just reinforcing what
I say above. Linux is completely GPL, so it's not even only open source.
Is Free Software, meaning the license if more restrictive than, for
example, phobos. This means is harder to adopt by companies and you
can't possibly change it in a closed way if you want to distribute
a binary. Same for C++, which is not a project, is a standards, but the
most successful and widespread compiler, GCC, not only is free, is the
battle horse of free software, of the GNU project and created by the
most extremist free software advocate ever. Android might be the only
valid case (but I'm not really familiar with Android model), but the
kernel, since is based on Linux, has to have the source code when
released. Maybe the drivers are closed source.

You are missing more closely related projects, like Python, Haskel, Ruby, Perl, and probably 90% of the newish programming languages, which are all 100% open source. And very successful I might say. The key is always breaking into the corporate ground and make those corporations contribute.

There are valid examples of project using hybrid models but they are
usually software as a service models, not very applicable to
a compiler/language, like Wordpress, or other web applications. Other
valid examples are MySQL, or QT I think used an hybrid model at least
once. Lots of them died and were resurrected as 100% free projects, like
StarOffice -> OpenOffice -> LibreOffice.

And finally making the *optimizer* (or some optimizations) closed will be hardly a good business, being that there are 2 other backends out there that usually kicks DMD backend ass already, so people needing more speed will probably just switch to gdc or ldc.

> This talk prominently mentioned scaling to a million users and being professional: going commercial is the only way to get there.

As in breaking into the commercial world? Then agreed. If you imply commercial == closing some parts of the source, then I think you are WAY OFF.

-- 
Leandro Lucarella (AKA luca)                     http://llucax.com.ar/
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Dr. Harvey Kellogg tried to make a cure for masturbation
When he made cornflakes

Joakim, el 26 de June a las 08:33 me escribiste:
> It is amazing how far D has gotten with no business model: money certainly isn't everything.  But it is probably impossible to get to a million users or offer professionalism without commercial implementations.

Yeah, right, probably Python and Ruby have only 5k users...

This argument is BS.

-- 
Leandro Lucarella (AKA luca)                     http://llucax.com.ar/
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I'll stay home forever
Where two & two always
makes up five

On Wednesday, 26 June 2013 at 11:08:17 UTC, Leandro Lucarella wrote:
> Android might be the only valid case (but I'm not really familiar with Android model), but the kernel, since is based on Linux, has to have the source code when
> released. Maybe the drivers are closed source.

It is perfectly open http://source.android.com/source/licenses.html ;)
Drivers tend to be closed source, but drivers are not part fo Android project, they are private to vendors.

On Tuesday, 25 June 2013 at 21:38:01 UTC, Joakim wrote:
> I don't know the views of the key contributors, but I wonder if they would have such a knee-jerk reaction against any paid/closed work.  The current situation would seem much more of a kick in the teeth to me: spending time trying to be "professional," as Andrei asks, and producing a viable, stable product used by a million developers, corporate users included, but never receiving any compensation for this great tool you've poured effort into, that your users are presumably often making money with.

Obviously I can't speak for the core developers, or even for the community as a group.  But I can make the following observations.

D's success as a language is _entirely_ down to volunteer effort -- as Walter highlighted in his keynote.  Volunteer effort is responsible for the development of the compiler frontend, the runtime, and the standard library.  Volunteers have put in the hard work of porting these to other compiler backends.  Volunteers have made and reviewed language improvement proposals, and have been vigilant in reporting and resolving bugs.  Volunteers also contribute to vibrant discussions on these very forums, providing support and advice to those in need of help.  And many of these volunteers have been doing so over the course of years.

Now, in trying to drive more funding and professional effort towards D development, do you _really_ think that the right thing to do is to turn around to all those people and say: "Hey guys, after all the work you put in to make D so great, now we're going to build on that, but you'll have to wait 6 months for the extra goodies unless you pay"?

How do you think that will affect the motivation of all those volunteers -- the code contributors, the bug reporters, the forum participants?  What could you say to the maintainers of GDC or LDC, after all they've done to enable people to use the language, that could justify denying their compilers up-to-date access to the latest features?  How would it affect the atmosphere of discussion about language development -- compared to the current friendly, collegial approach?

... and -- how do you think it would affect uptake, if it was announced that access to the best features would come at a price?  There are orders of magnitude of difference between uptake of free and non-free services no matter what the domain, and software is one where free (as in freedom and beer) is much more strongly desired than in many other fields.

> I understand that such a shift from being mostly OSS to having some closed components can be tricky, but that depends on the particular community.  I don't think any OSS project has ever become popular without having some sort of commercial model attached to it.  C++ would be nowhere without commercial compilers; linux would be unheard of without IBM and Red Hat figuring out a consulting/support model around it; and Android would not have put the linux kernel on hundreds of millions of computing devices without the hybrid model that Google employed, where they provide an open source core, paid for through increased ad revenue from Android devices, and the hardware vendors provide closed hardware drivers and UI skins on top of the OSS core.

There's a big difference between introducing commercial models with a greater degree of paid professional work, and introducing closed components.  Red Hat is a good example of that -- I can get, legally and for free, a fully functional copy of Red Hat Enterprise Linux without paying a penny.  It's just missing the Red Hat name and logos and the support contract.

In another email you mentioned Microsoft's revenues from Visual Studio but -- leaving aside for a moment all the moral and strategic concerns of closing things up -- Visual Studio enjoys that success because it's a virtually essential tool for professional development on Microsoft Windows, which still has an effective monopoly on modern desktop computing.  Microsoft has the market presence to be able to dictate terms like that -- no one else does.  Certainly no upcoming programming language could operate like that!

> This talk prominently mentioned scaling to a million users and being professional: going commercial is the only way to get there.

It's more likely that closing off parts of the offering would limit that uptake, for reasons already given.  On the other hand, with more and more organizations coming to use and rely on D, there are plenty of other ways professional development could be brought in.  Just to take one example: companies with a mission-critical interest in D have a corresponding interest in their developers giving time to the language itself.  How many such companies do you think there need to be before D has a stable of skilled professional developers being paid explicitly to maintain and develop the language?

Your citation of the Linux kernel is relevant here.  Do you think that Linux would have had all that diverse success if parts of it had been closed up and sold at a premium?  D's status as a purely community-run project is an asset compared to corporate-backed languages, not a liability.

On Wednesday, 26 June 2013 at 10:18:58 UTC, Jacob Carlborg wrote:
> that you're talking about the graphical designer I was talking about the one implementing the design, web developer/frontend developer or what to call it.

Ah yes. Still though, I don't think ddoc is that big of a deal, especially since there's a few of us here who can do the translations if needed.

> I wouldn't give the graphical designer access to the code either. It needs to be integrated with the backend code (which is Ruby or similar) anyway, to fetch the correct data and so on.

Right.

On 2013-06-26 12:16, Leandro Lucarella wrote:

> Yeah, right, probably Python and Ruby have only 5k users...

There are companies backing those languages, at least Ruby, to some extent.

-- 
/Jacob Carlborg

On Wednesday, 26 June 2013 at 12:39:05 UTC, Jacob Carlborg wrote:
> On 2013-06-26 12:16, Leandro Lucarella wrote:
>
>> Yeah, right, probably Python and Ruby have only 5k users...
>
> There are companies backing those languages, at least Ruby, to some extent.

They don't own them, though -- they commit resources to them because the language's ongoing development serves their business needs.

On Tuesday, 25 June 2013 at 08:21:38 UTC, Mike Parker wrote:
> On Tuesday, 25 June 2013 at 05:57:30 UTC, Peter Williams wrote:
> D Season of Code! Then we don't have to restrict ourselves to one time of the year.

D Seasons of Code! Why to restrict to a single season? Let's code all the year long! :)

Jacob Carlborg, el 26 de June a las 14:39 me escribiste:
> On 2013-06-26 12:16, Leandro Lucarella wrote:
> 
> >Yeah, right, probably Python and Ruby have only 5k users...
> 
> There are companies backing those languages, at least Ruby, to some extent.

Read my other post, I won't repeat myself :)

-- 
Leandro Lucarella (AKA luca)                     http://llucax.com.ar/
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