On 01/30/2011 08:27 AM, retard wrote:
Sun, 30 Jan 2011 09:06:57 -0500, Heywood Floyd wrote:
Jeff Nowakowski Wrote:
There's nothing wrong with being in it for money, but it would be nice
to know up front and in what manner.
I've been meaning to ask, and I'll just take this oppurtunity, and it
relates to what Jeff just said:
If one would like to donate money to D, how would one do that? Would it
even make any sense? Or be needed?
And this naturally raises the question: Who/what owns D? Is it a
non-profit, a group of people, or a business? And regardless of who owns
D, is there any D-only organisation that one could support, financially?
I'm not demanding an answer, I'm just sharing my thoughts.
I mean, it would feel weird to donate money to Digital Mars, a
for-profit company, that does all kinds of things, including C++, right?
If I was to feel confident in donating it would have to be to some sort
of formally founded non-profit legal body with some sort of constitution
like "to further the development of D" or something. I don't know how
these things work. I guess right now D is too small and the legal cost
of just maintaining such an organisation would surpass any donations
anyway.
D is basically Walter's language. He decides what goes in and how stuff
works. People who live nearby are somewhat able to influence the process.
This is a meritocracy: people who are good will exert an influence on
the language and its standard library. Don is an incredibly strong
contributor and he's living in Europe; I've only seen him once in my
life. If Don had language design as a focus, I'm sure he would very
strongly influence the definition of the language. This is because he is
talented, competent, and motivated. Steve is in New York City. I don't
know where other strong contributors are, but definitely they help shape
the language.
So far it doesn't look like any earmarked money has been used to buy
specific features. For example I doubt that even if you donate one
million USD, they won't rename the keywords or __traits into something
readable or add built-in first class tuples.
That would take someone rich and incredibly petty. It's not, however,
impossible that a corporation would seriously consider adoption of the
language but would have a specific need that needs be met as a
prerequisite. Such things happened with things like ABIs, interfacing
with other languages and systems, specific libraries, certain
optimizations etc.
I also doubt you can make
the dmc/dmd backend FOSS with any sum of money. If you wanted some
changes badly, I'd recommend donating the money to some democratic
community language without any BDFL persons.
I think that's just false. With money the backend could be bought from
Symantec.
Andrei
