Comment by WalterBright 2 months ago
I receive $0 compensation for working on the D compiler. It's Boost licensed. Everyone is free to use it for whatever they want, and the source code is free to use, too.
I'm fully aware of what I'm doing :-)
The D Language Foundation is a non-profit, has expenses, and is funded by donations. None of it goes to me.
I assume, then, that you do it because it's fun :) That's why I do open source.
Yes, it's fun, and I like design work making things better. It's fun seeing other languages adopting D design innovations.
Do you think making important, widely used open-source software is a good idea when it's being done, for fun? What happens when it's no longer fun, but 150,000 people depend on it for their job?
Imagine Linus Tarvolds stopped working on Linux before there was a foundation to take over because he did it just for fun and no one else wanted to take up the mantle? It's hard to say what the outcome from that would have been... maybe Google would have claimed it entirely and slowly shifted the license to something else?
I appreciate that people can create things for fun, and those things can be open-source, but if someone creates something because it's the right thing to do and not just about fun... well where do we stand now? Should they make it open-source but demand money? Should it be closed-source if the fun-factor is less than 80%? 50%?
Unless a small, dedicated team of capable people agree that your open-source project is worth preserving, allowing it to survive you as the founder, I question the validity of open-sourcing anything for fun unless you design the licence, and more, to enable you to walk away and/or get bored.
Would love to hear your thoughts.
> What happens when it's no longer fun, but 150,000 people depend on it for their job?
Then someone else can take over, or not, depending on how important it really is to those 150000.
From the perspective of a business, using open source is strictly safer than closed source. With closed source, if the entity owning the code goes bankrupt, increases licensing fees substantially, just axes the project (incidentally what Google is also known for) or looses interest in some other way, you are out of luck. Go find something similar and hope there is a migration path. With open source, the equivalent is the maintainer walking away because they are bored, and you have the code right there to take over, or pay someone else to do so.
> I question the validity of open-sourcing anything for fun unless you design the licence, and more, to enable you to walk away and/or get bored.
Every open source license is already designed so that you can just walk away for whatever reason, e.g. when you are bored.
> THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED “AS IS”, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. - MIT license
When using open source, you take that risk. I've used a lot of libraries that have been abandoned over the years where I either had to switch to a fork, another library entirely, or just write the functionality myself. I know the risk inherent in OSS. For large projects like Linux, since it's so large, someone else would pick it up, but again, there's always a risk that someone doesn't.
Not everything I do for the D Language Foundation is fun, but think of it like not every task taking care of one's car is fun, despite liking most of it.
> you design the licence, and more, to enable you to walk away and/or get bored.
It's all Boost licensed, so anyone can fork it, anyone can step up and continue with it, etc.
As D's scope has increased, a lot more of the tasks have been delegated out. I do a lot less management than I used to, and get to concentrate on the parts I'm good at.
> What happens when it's no longer fun, but 150,000 people depend on it for their job?
Then a few of those 150,000 people can start contributing and take over maintainership. If no one wants to step up, then I guess it isn't that important to them.
If you're depending on a one-person open source show for your company's livelihood, it's on you if you don't have a contingency plan for if/when that one person decides to abandon the project, or, hell, dies or gets too ill to continue working on it.
> I question the validity of open-sourcing anything for fun unless you design the licence, and more, to enable you to walk away and/or get bored.
No one owes you anything. Any way that anyone wants to open source something is perfectly valid. No one has to use their work for free, or under any particular terms. People who need the functionality from an open source project are free to find a different project (free or paid) or build their own, if they are uncomfortable with how a particular project is managed or licensed.
> I question the validity of open-sourcing anything for fun unless you design the licence, and more, to enable you to walk away and/or get bored.
I’m unaware of any open source license that prevents an author from walking away, ever? GPLv3 has no warranty or liability?
I guess you meant something with “and more”, but that sounds like a mismatch of expectations of what a user of open source might want, vs what is required of an author of open source?
> What happens when it's no longer fun, but 150,000 people depend on it for their job?
Then 150,000 people should open their wallet, or crack open a text editor, and pay.
> design the licence, and more, to enable you to walk away and/or get bored.
THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.
C++'s ranges came from D, but C++ decided to construct ranges from a (begin, end) pair, which is not as good as D's design. D's ranges are constructed from a (pointer,length) pair.
Thank you for your contributions. I believe the world would be a better place if you were paid for them.
The problem with being paid is then the payer gets to call the shots. By not being paid, then D has a chance at a consistent, coherent design.
I sometimes say "hell no" to features popular in other languages (like version algebra, and macros). How do you say "hell no" to your employer?
Yes, but the article is not talking about your scenario. It is talking about commercial software, where people would need to be paid to ensure that the software is supported on the platforms they like.
You have the privilege of being able to develop open-source but that's hardly a sustainable model.
Thank you! I needed a robust algo to enumerate loops in directed multigraphs, and found an implementation of Hawick's algorithm in D. Instead of writing my own implementation in the language I use, I decided to just compile the code I found and call the binary. Went super-smoothly, even though I had never used D. Great work!