On Thursday, March 22, 2018 21:25:11 Nick Sabalausky via Digitalmars-d wrote: > On 03/18/2018 11:43 PM, Norm wrote: > > We don't want to be treated special. We don't want to give back. This is > > the *entire* point. > > An attitude like that and there's any wonder it didn't work out? Sheesh. > > This is the thing about OSS: The business willing to give back (and > there are many such businesses) are the ones that reap benefits. The > companies that wilfully cling to zero-sum bullshit are on their own, by > their own choice, and open themselves to allowing their competitors to > take the advantage for themselves. That is the way of the world, that is > the way of reality. > > D can't be held responsible for self-defeating zero-sum, "us vs them" > mentalities. Sheesh.
While I do think that there's a lot to be said for companies who are willing to use open source and give back to the community in the process, there are plenty of people (and not just companies) who just want a tool to get things done. And I don't think that there's anything wrong with that. Yes, everyone is better off when companies are willing to give back, but that doesn't work for everyone, and honestly, there are some places where I've worked where I wouldn't want them trying to give back, because they wouldn't be giving back anything of value and/or it would be of poor quality. But regardless of the quality of code involved, your average company is not going to do much in terms of contributing to open source, even if ultimately, we're all better off if folks in general contribute back from time to time. And I think that it's quite safe to say that regardless of what folks are giving back or not giving back, we'd all be better off if D were in a place that the average user could use it without running into serious problems, and we wouldn't have companies saying that they couldn't use D because of bugs or whatnot. I think that we're in a _much_ better place with regards to that than we once were and that the situation continues to improve, but clearly, some of the issues that we still have are showstoppers for some folks. We're never going to please everyone, but we do want D to be solid and not _require_ that the average D user give back even if we'd very much like for folks to give back where they can. - Jonathan M Davis
