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.
The notion is that individual developers could work on patches to
fix bugs or add features to ldc/druntime/phobos then sell those
closed patches to paying customers. After enough time has
passed, so that sufficient customers have adequately paid for the
work or after a set time limit beyond that, the patch is open
sourced and merged back upstream. It would have to be ldc and
not dmd, as the dmd backend is not open source and the gdc
backend license doesn't allow such closed patches.
This works better than bounties because it avoids the "tragedy of
the commons" problem inherent to open source and bounties, ie any
user can just wait for some other contributor or any potential
individual paying customer has an incentive to wait and let
somebody else pay a bounty, then use the resulting work for free
right away. With this approach, non-paying users only get the
resulting paid work after the work has been paid for and perhaps
an additional delay after that.
Two big benefits come out of this approach. Obviously, this
would provide commercial support for paying customers, but the
other big benefit is that it doesn't depend on some company
providing that support. A decentralized group of devs could work
on and get paid for these individual patches on their own,
without having to get together and start a company.
I'm writing about this idea to see how much interest there is
from D developers for doing such paid work and from paying
customers to pay for such work. For those who believe this isn't
part of the open source aspect of D, it isn't. This doesn't have
to be a part of the D open source project, even if the work
ultimately often ends up back in the official github repos, after
a delay.
I believe this is the needed step to turn the D community from a
tribe into an organization, as Andrei said recently. More
rationale about this hybrid licensing model can be found in this
article I wrote almost five years ago:
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=sprewell_licensing
