I've been a member of the D community for about 13 years now, and I'm impressed with how much has happened over that period of time with the language and community.   However, I wonder who pays for all of this?   I feel like a lot of the infrastructure is taken for granted, and provided ad-hoc by members of the community and/or Walter Bright from his non-D ventures.

Might it be time for a formation of a D Programming Language Foundation to which people can donate and funds some of the hosting, and possibly pay for some time of the various heavy contributors?

-Shammah

On 10/4/2014 5:18 PM, Shammah Chancellor wrote:
> I've been a member of the D community for about 13 years now, and I'm impressed
> with how much has happened over that period of time with the language and
> community.   However, I wonder who pays for all of this? I feel like a lot of
> the infrastructure is taken for granted, and provided ad-hoc by members of the
> community and/or Walter Bright from his non-D ventures.

Yes, lots of us contribute things that cost money. For example, David Held recently donated 8 rack servers to power the autotester. Brad Roberts has financed the rest of the autotester and its ongoing expenses. Vladimir is hosting the D forums and keeps them running smoothly. Lots more have stepped up as needed.


> Might it be time for a formation of a D Programming Language Foundation to which
> people can donate and funds some of the hosting, and possibly pay for some time
> of the various heavy contributors?

We're not really limited by lack of funds, but more by lack of focussed effort. If anyone wants to contribute funds, probably the best use would be to add bug bounties for bugzilla issues that they find to be neglected. The bounties don't really compensate at professional rates, but they do work as a nice "thanks" to those who donate their valuable time.

On 2014-10-04 11:33 PM, Walter Bright wrote:
> We're not really limited by lack of funds, but more by lack of focussed
> effort. If anyone wants to contribute funds, probably the best use would
> be to add bug bounties for bugzilla issues that they find to be
> neglected. The bounties don't really compensate at professional rates,
> but they do work as a nice "thanks" to those who donate their valuable
> time.
>

Programmers cost money, it would be nice to have a D Foundation where companies can donate and maybe eventually use the funds to pay for professional staffing rather than relying only on contributors. The D foundation can eventually grow towards having engineers on the phone to reassure some about development bottlenecks in the low-level software. Examples would be Mozilla foundation or Wikimedia foundation but with an Oracle or IBM type of service for support. It's an easily missed requirement in corporate decisions for reliance on software.

On Sunday, 5 October 2014 at 18:06:49 UTC, Etienne wrote:
>
> Programmers cost money, it would be nice to have a D Foundation where companies can donate and maybe eventually use the funds to pay for professional staffing rather than relying only on contributors. The D foundation can eventually grow towards having engineers on the phone to reassure some about development bottlenecks in the low-level software. Examples would be Mozilla foundation or Wikimedia foundation but with an Oracle or IBM type of service for support. It's an easily missed requirement in corporate decisions for reliance on software.

Boost consulting comes to mind as well.  Though I honestly couldn't say how practical this is for D today.

On Sunday, 5 October 2014 at 20:45:06 UTC, Sean Kelly wrote:
> On Sunday, 5 October 2014 at 18:06:49 UTC, Etienne wrote:
>>
>> Programmers cost money, it would be nice to have a D Foundation where companies can donate and maybe eventually use the funds to pay for professional staffing rather than relying only on contributors. The D foundation can eventually grow towards having engineers on the phone to reassure some about development bottlenecks in the low-level software. Examples would be Mozilla foundation or Wikimedia foundation but with an Oracle or IBM type of service for support. It's an easily missed requirement in corporate decisions for reliance on software.
>
> Boost consulting comes to mind as well.  Though I honestly couldn't say how practical this is for D today.

Well, Boost Consulting is no more so, given D's much smaller user
base, I suspect it wouldn't be very sustainable for D either.

On 2014-10-05 03:33:36 +0000, Walter Bright said:

> We're not really limited by lack of funds, but more by lack of focussed effort. If anyone wants to contribute funds, probably the best use would be to add bug bounties for bugzilla issues that they find to be neglected. The bounties don't really compensate at professional rates, but they do work as a nice "thanks" to those who donate their valuable time.

I've placed a couple of anonymous bounties, but I personally think it's a bad way to get directed focused effort.  A democracy of people trying to get what they individually want done through small donations?

There are many languages which have grown more quickly than D (despite being less interesting) because they have a foundation where people can donate, or some company, which provides for the core developers.   I'm not saying that having a non-profit will magically generate money, but there are a few companies who use D out there who just might be willing to donate non-trivial sums of money to further development if there was a non-profit to see that the money was put to good use.

Just to name a few:

Python: https://www.python.org/psf-landing/
Node.JS:  http://www.joyent.com/
Perl: http://www.perlfoundation.org
Linux Core Developers: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_Foundation
Ruby Core Developers: https://www.heroku.com (A subsidiary of Salesforce)

-S

On 10/4/14, 8:33 PM, Walter Bright wrote:
>> Might it be time for a formation of a D Programming Language
>> Foundation to which
>> people can donate and funds some of the hosting, and possibly pay for
>> some time
>> of the various heavy contributors?
>
> We're not really limited by lack of funds,

whaaa

> but more by lack of focussed
> effort. If anyone wants to contribute funds, probably the best use would
> be to add bug bounties for bugzilla issues that they find to be
> neglected. The bounties don't really compensate at professional rates,
> but they do work as a nice "thanks" to those who donate their valuable
> time.

A $150 monthly contribution would cover our hosting costs. $1000 per month would cover the yearly basic costs for DConf. $500 more per month would add A/V for the conference. We've had DConf partially sponsored, but it's good to have autonomy. Some more couple thousands would buy us things like a web designer. $2000 or more per month would possibly get us a person to put on things that are urgent and important.

We're very much limited by the lack of funds.


Andrei

On 10/5/14, 7:28 PM, Shammah Chancellor wrote:
> There are many languages which have grown more quickly than D (despite
> being less interesting) because they have a foundation where people can
> donate, or some company, which provides for the core developers.   I'm
> not saying that having a non-profit will magically generate money, but
> there are a few companies who use D out there who just might be willing
> to donate non-trivial sums of money to further development if there was
> a non-profit to see that the money was put to good use.
>
> Just to name a few:
>
> Python: https://www.python.org/psf-landing/
> Node.JS:  http://www.joyent.com/
> Perl: http://www.perlfoundation.org
> Linux Core Developers: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_Foundation
> Ruby Core Developers: https://www.heroku.com (A subsidiary of Salesforce)

C++ also has a foundation since 2012: http://pocoproject.org/blog/?p=671. It paid for CppCon 2014, which was very successful.

I believe a foundation would help D. Unfortunately, setting one up is very laborious, and neither Walter nor I know anything about that - from what I understand it takes a _lot_ of work. If anyone is able and willing to embark on creating a foundation for D, that would be a great help to the language and its community.


Andrei

On 06/10/14 03:28, Shammah Chancellor via Digitalmars-d wrote: […]
> I've placed a couple of anonymous bounties, but I personally think it's a bad way to get directed focused effort.  A democracy of people trying to get what they individually want done through small donations?
> 
> […]

Conversely, Groovy has become a major language in the Java-verse without a foundation. Historically it grew simply as a community FOSS project but then as the major "applications" (Grails and Gradle being the two main ones currently, but there are others), it became clear that consulting companies could be profitable because there was traction in the market. G2One was formed which was very quickly bought by SpringSource which was bought by VMWare which got spawned off as part of Pivotal. Pivotal do not own Groovy (though they do imply they own Grails, which is fine) but they do fund three full-time employees on the Groovy project. Also Gradleware was formed to consult about Gradle use and managed to get Maven replaced by Gradle as the primary build tool for Android (and also there was a shift from Eclipse to IntelliJ IDEA as the basis of the primary IDE). Add to this the Spock test framework which is rapidly gaining traction over TestNG and JUnit4, and Groovy is actually in a very good position even without a foundation.

Conversely to that a foundation is nonetheless being considered simply as an organization to own the "product" (as PSF owns Python). However, the USA is looking increasingly the place *NOT* to set up a foundation. It is allright for existing ones, such as Python, but the hurdles to create new ones are becoming astronomical.

UK, France and Germany are currently being investigated as places to set up a "non profit". For the UK, the issue is for a company to become a registered charity so as to be able to handle funds without incurring corporation tax. There are other alternatives in the UK and it is currently being checked whether one of these is a good route to a full on charitable status company. The issue is whether conversion of the originating organization to a company with charitable status can be achieved as a single action. Sadly for us just now lawyers opinions cost money…
> 
- --
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On 6 Oct 2014 05:05, "Andrei Alexandrescu via Digitalmars-d" < digitalmars-d@puremagic.com> wrote:
>
> On 10/4/14, 8:33 PM, Walter Bright wrote:
>>>
>>> Might it be time for a formation of a D Programming Language
>>> Foundation to which
>>> people can donate and funds some of the hosting, and possibly pay for
>>> some time
>>> of the various heavy contributors?
>>
>>
>> We're not really limited by lack of funds,
>
>
> whaaa
>
>
>> but more by lack of focussed
>> effort. If anyone wants to contribute funds, probably the best use would
>> be to add bug bounties for bugzilla issues that they find to be
>> neglected. The bounties don't really compensate at professional rates,
>> but they do work as a nice "thanks" to those who donate their valuable
>> time.
>
>
> A $150 monthly contribution would cover our hosting costs.

Around $18 monthly would cover the cost of hosting costs for everything on gdcproject.org.

Saying that, I have been slowly collecting donations of hardware and having a location to host the kit to be set-up as build/port boxes would be nice. Currently have a PPC server, an ARM box, and an Epiphany board. In the next months expecting a MIPS board and an IA-64 server.

Iain