On Wednesday, 25 May 2022 at 13:06:41 UTC, Ola Fosheim Grøstad wrote:
> How many does DPlug need to become independent of the original author?
Thinking too much about this nowadays :)
Realistically it take one well-selling product from someone else.
The best case scenario is a medium to large company to adopt and fork the open-source library, to eventually maintain it because it can't scale to their uses. Frameworks like this can be seen as asset by people with vertical ambitions (the sector tries concentrating). Good riddance :)
The worst case it, surprisingly, that more and more beginners would appear (or people posturing as beginners), taking an increasing amount of basic support until the maintainer resign. This is actually the number one risk, and one possible counter-measure is to make everyone pay and give them no access to the bugtracker, like JUCE does.
So there is a "debt vs asset" position to account for, it is that the current community must be able to create net-positive contributions.
I'm always on the look out for ways to incenticize sticking around, making contributions, and basing revenue streams on top of Dplug. It's not easy to explain this to well-meaning, but demanding users. It might mean showing people the door.
So currently, 5 developers that I know of use the framework to make products for themselves ; none came from the D community. These are only the uses I know about, some people don't want to engage with a community.
Even today, Dplug could be deleted and forks would appear, because revenue streams depend on it, but it probably doesn't yet cover the full cost of evolutive maintenance - it is about 6 man-month a year. So I'm not sure if it would last long, and that is a problem indeed. Revenue stream is the mechanical force that motivates for years. Now you must explain to users how to compete with you...
Dplug is a by-product of plugins that sell, it couldn't exist otherwise. If Vibrant had sold more than 200 copies :) perhaps it could have a framework too. But it was a bitter commercial failure and couldn't justify the maintenance, so everything about it is retired.
(To make a net-positive game framework, one would have to target game developers and the middleware market, which is a lot easier than the game market.)
Cost of making the by-product available in open-source is there, but you have unintended positive consequences too (more ecosystem, input, community, things happening).