Comment by pjmlp
5 hours ago
Actually, the harsh reality is that for a large majority it has been an easier way to pirate, nothing else, while feeling entitled to scream at the poor maintainers for not implementing whatever features they needed for yesterday.
What a boringly reductive take.
It's not like hackernews is some amazing bastion of like, optimism and culture and interesting conversation, but surely we can do better than this?
HackerNews, the site when someone posts about their business for developer tooling, there is always a bunch of folks posting links about half implemented alternatives, because who wants to pay for tooling like any other professionals?
Is there some magical utopian profession where people want to pay for tooling? Like, I'm sure there are people/groups who spend more on tools, like say, all the plumbers and carpenters buying $600 dewalt drills or whatever, but I'm having trouble with the idea that they want to do that.
If programmers, on average, don't pay very much for tooling, the magic of capitalism tells me that's because the tools aren't worth very much.
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This is also completely self inflicted. This is one of the only professions that does not want to pay for their tools and will do anything to get it for free, including building it themselves.
So this is quite unsurprising that open source developers have become this decade's new starving artists asking for donations for their "free software" only for a coding agent to do it for close to $0.
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