Comment by OkayPhysicist
15 hours ago
The highest quality tools in the software development space tend to be FOSS, because unlike any other field, we are employed in the field that makes the tools our field uses, and distribution and manufacturing costs are zero.
People build tools that they want to use, then share it with others because it's free to. If the rest of the economy worked like this we would be in full-blown utopia.
Selling software to software developers is always going to have a pretty low ceiling, because you're always going to be competing with "I could build this myself" while dealing with a bunch of users who will have the nagging thought of "Why the heck does this bug exist/this feature not exist? I could fix this in an afternoon." Ironically, open source relieves this pressure for multiple orders of magnitude more people than actually contribute, because they're only grappling with their own laziness, rather than resenting you, the developer.
> The highest quality tools in the software development space tend to be FOSS
> People build tools that they want to use, then share it with others because it's free to
This maybe sounds true on the surface, but isn't really? Prior to VSCode, Visual Studio was the most-used editor by professional developers for a very long time, with Sublime Text and Jetbrains' IDEs being close behind, and the paid options are still among the most popular. While VSCode is wildly successful, and has completely unprecedented adoption rates, it was not borne out of people "building tools because they want to, then sharing it because it's free", but is rather the result of Microsoft's calculated gamble that open-source would give them more ecosystem capture and useful data through telemetry in the long run.
> Selling software to software developers is always going to have a pretty low ceiling, because you're always going to be competing with "I could build this myself"
This shouldn't really be true if software developers would think rationally about tools for three seconds. I believe the US median compensation for developers is approaching $200k? Any tool that saves a single hour of productivity is likely paying for itself, maybe two or three for the more expensive ones. Something that saves 40 hours of productivity is basically worth its weight in gold. You might be able to say "I can build this myself", but can you build it yourself in 1 hour? 40 hours? For most software, it would still take even longer than that. If you are a paid professional, and value your own time anywhere near what your employer does (I personally value my time more than any employer ever did), you should be extremely grateful for any opportunity to spend trivial sums of money in a way that allows you to reclaim hours to use in other ways.
I've been programming since ~1999 and anecdataly don't remember programmers having a culture of paying for their dev tools. On linux everything's free, and on windows I've used a plethora of freeware IDEs/compilers/etc. from turbo pascal, dev c++ (that's the name of it), later on eclipse took the stage in it's buggy mess and right before vscode there was atom. The only people that I know that used visual studio either got it for free for being a student/teacher, had their job pay for it, or most commonly: pirated it.
According to this[1] site visual studio had a 35.6% marketshare, tied at #1 with notepad++.
[1] https://asterisk.dynevor.org/editor-dominance.html
> or most commonly: pirated it.
Yes, I'm aware. That's the problem elucidated in the article. Developers expect everything for free, even though the price of tools relative to what they get paid to deliver products using those tools is completely trivial. This reluctance to pay for anything harms developers themselves most of all. If developers normalized a culture of paying for things they use, more developers would be able to develop their own independent software and sustain themselves without being beholden to $awful_corp_environment to pay the bills. But because developers will do anything they can to avoid paying <1 hr salary for a tool that saves them many hours, there is a huge gap between corporate professionals, who make lots of money, and open-source developers, most of whom make almost nothing, with only a relatively limited subset of independent developers able to bridge the gap and make a living producing good, non-corporate-nightmare software.
I'm pretty pro-piracy for students and such. It is an extremely good thing for learning to be as available as possible, even to those in poverty, so that they can make something better of their situation and contribute more to society than if they were locked in to low-knowledge careers solely by virtue of the random chance of their upbringing. But people who make a living off software development never graduate from the mindset of piracy. Even for open-source software, the vast majority of users never contribute to funding those projects they rely on. If we think open-source software is good for the world, why are we so opposed to anyone being able to make a living creating it? The world's corporate capture by non-free software is a direct result of our own collective actions in refusing to pay anything for anything even when we can afford to.
As heavy Borland user I am quite sure none of their software was freeware.
Yes they had educational discounts, but that was it.
Turbo Pascal was not freeware when it was new.
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While many hobbyists developer market, like the hobbyist graphic design market, pirated their tools, the corporate market did paid for their tools.
The issue here is that they the developers aren't convincing their companies to pay for libraries now, partly because a lot of the tools are now free.
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Well, I've been programming since 1986 and I had to buy all the compilers I used. For the Mac: Lightspeed Pascal, Lightspeed C and Metrowerks. I wish I had the money to buy MPW. Linux then was just a glint in Linus's eyes. We didn't have the internet with easy access to pirated software. I didn't do BB's so I don't know about that area. Once I went to uni in the 90's I started using Usenet but even then I didn't download any pirated software. Microsoft was virtually giving away Visual Studio/Visual Basic to University students. Back then I also remember reading Linus' arguments with Tanenbaum over microkernels and this funny language called Python and its creator unveiling/supporting it on Usenet. Around that time more and more tools were being offered for free and as a poor student I was delighted. Also we got access to free Unix tools since as we were doing work on Unix systems. Oh yeah, I remembered using this cool functional language called Miranda in one of my courses but was sad that it was a paid product. And then I heard about the debut of Haskell which was sort of a free answer to Miranda.
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Back in ye olden days, prior to teh interwebs, compilers were not free and it was an assumed price of entry to programming. Pirating has always been a thing, but I've paid for more than one compiler in my life and I wasn't exactly flush with cash.
As a hobbyist programmer I make precisely zero dollars a year so paying for my tools only makes sense if they increase my nonmonetary enjoyment. As an employee I have very little power to convince my company to buy a certain tool and I tend to prefer the tools I‘m already familiar with from my hobby.
Equipment for any real life hobby costs money, and people are willing to pay for good equipment. Why is software so different? FOSS has made us so resistant to paying for good software. I'm not saying software has to be expensive, even $20 per major version could make a burgeoning indie industry thrive.
I believe that there is a difference between developers as persons and developers as employees.
As a person, I don't think that I am very likely to pay for the tool I use to develop in my free time.
As an employee, I need to convince my company to pay for the tool. If it is a subscription, that's even worse. So well-known ones like Microsoft tools might already be approved, but for not-so-famous ones, it's harder.
If I want to depend on a third-party library/tool, I need to convince my company that the licence is fine, that the security is fine, and if it's not free I need to convince them to pay for it.
Back when MSDN subscriptions where a thing and people still used Visual Studio, the tools were a lot better. Debuggers worked and did impressive things (time travel debugging! Rewind your entire program state! Step through from your website code all the way to your database queries within the same debugging session! Easily debug remote servers!). Developer documentation was professionally written and edited.
Now everything is free and we get what we pay for.
> People build tools that they want to use, then share it with others because it's free to. If the rest of the economy worked like this we would be in full-blown utopia.
But the rest of the economy doesn't work like this, so support your OSS projects financially.
Very true. On immich, I've always wanted a way to do certain operations locally like adding to an album before the photo/video is fully uploaded, but I'm not frustrated that it's not possible because if I cared enough I'd create a pull request. For features that Google Photos is/was missing, I'm not as generous.
> The highest quality tools in the software development space tend to be FOSS
LLMs are also software and OSS (let alone FOSS ones) aren't even close to the quality of closed models like GPT 5.2 or Opus 4.5.
LLMs are more money thrown at their training than software development, and you need prohibitive costly hardware to run the biggest ones.
Calling some "OSS" is simply misleading.
> distribution and manufacturing costs are zero.
???? citation needed
Once the software is written, it is ~free to copy. People pay a lot of money to avoid the software getting copied... and it gets copied anyways.
The thing is that one software is easy to crack and copy, so it is cheap...but a lot of softwares to work together is not, so that's why we have SaaS and PaaS today.
> you're always going to be competing with "I could build this myself"
Even more so these days with agentic coding
> People build tools that they want to use, then share it with others because it's free to. If the rest of the economy worked like this we would be in full-blown utopia.
Post-AGI economics seems to bring cost of production and distribution very close to zero, so this may soon come to pass. Culture might need a minute to catch up though!
> Post-AGI economics seems to bring cost of production and distribution very close to zero, so this may soon come to pass. Culture might need a minute to catch up though!
People on HN read too much SciFi.
> Manufacturing costs are zero
No. The fact that you built something yourself doesn't make it free to produce.
More over, you __won't__. You simply cannot build all of the things that you could buy at scale. What if you had to write all of your own video games? Or operating systems?
I think they mean cost of incremental units. 0->1 is much more expensive than 1->100 in software, unlike with things like lattes or houses
I assumed that they meant "cost of production", since that's what you give to keep your money, so that includes 0->1. But if what they meant is what you said then I'd say that the cost of 0->1 is not somehow less important. Software does make 1->100 much more accessible though, so, in that way, you have an opportunity to help out very small businesses in a way that you can't in other industries, which is even more of a reason to buy code from your peers, IMO.
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