Making money from programming language design

This issue is dear to my heart, too, as a hobbyist programming language designer myself ;-)

I've never seen it as a route to income in itself - but it can do so indirectly. My project, ARGON (http://www.argon.org.uk/) is all about reinventing the platform we build software on - OS, programming language, libraries, file system, network protocol - purely because the current technologies we use are hampered by backward compatibility and poorly integrated; I think it'd be a good thing for the world to start again from scratch (and deal with compatibility at a higher level).

So I've thought more about how I might possibly make my hobby pay for itself. I think that an entire platform might well be successful as an embedded platform, as there's much less motivation for compatibility and a familiar programming environment in that market. In the workstation and server worlds, however, I think such a platform pretty much has to be open source, or it'll never be adopted by hackers who want something to play with. Then the usual open-source tricks will apply: selling boxed sets with manuals and 'enterprise tools' in, support contracts, commercial redistribution licenses, etc.

Getting rich by writing a book and general fame/glory leading to speaking engagements, however, is right out ;-)

MS's compilers have always been free(As far back as I can remember which would be VC6 where only the non optimizing compiler was free.) They charged for the IDE, and the optimizer. With the switch to .Net the optimizing compiler became free, and then a release or two latter a basic version of the IDE was released for free as well.