Comment by anonymous908213
15 hours ago
> 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.
It did have a remarkably low price, though - less than a tenth of UCSD p-System or Topspeed. Even the competitors in the hobbyist space like the original IBM/Microsoft Pascal and DRI's Pascal/MT originally cost 4-5x as much.
Really, it was responsible for as big a step change in pricing of programming tools in the 1980s as GNU, BSD, and Linux were in the 90s.
True. I never paid for it myself, but I think i got it from my uni. I had some of my fondest coding memories with it
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.
The pain process and paperwork to obtain a license for anything in a corporate environment is usually the biggest factor imho.
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.
I remember paying something like $400-500 for Glockenspiel C++ for MS-DOS, which was based on AT&T's cfront and compiled to C code. Not long after that, Turbo C++ and Zortech C++ made things a lot easier, since they didn't compile through C, like cfront did. Those were in the $150-200 range, iirc. I also remember paying for PC-YACC from Abraxas, something like $400.
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.