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Open Source Killing Commercial Developer Tools
jexrand recommends an interview with John De Goes in which he argues: "The tools market is dead. Open source killed it." The software developer turned president of N-BRAIN explains the effect that open source has had on the developer tools market, and how this forced the company to release the personal edition of UNA free of charge. According to De Goes, selling a source-code editor, even a very good one, is all but impossible in the post-open source era, especially given that, "Some developers would rather quit their job than be forced to use a new editor or IDE." N-BRAIN's decision is but one in a string of similar announcements from tools companies announcing the free release of their previously commercial development tools.
and gasoline killed steam, and steam killed sail, and sail killed slave rowers...
Its called progress.
If you want to complain, use emacs. That will give you a whole set of (other) reasons.
1. Give away software 2. ??? 3. Profit!
"What if I got hit by lightning while walking with an umbrella? Ban umbrellas! Fight the menace of lightning!" Doctorow
Markets which close because of open source tools are akin to weavers complaining about mechanical looms in days of old. Technology advances and no one wants to buy the old way any more. It is not a bad thing, it's progress. The less companies are paying for software the more they can spend on expanding their products and making money instead of sinking money into re-inventing the wheel.
I hope to get my current company to buy us IntelliJ licenses soon. I have collected points where it's significantly better than Eclipse, and will propose a testing period after the current release. If we can just get over the initial getting-used-to phase, I think there will be agreement that IntelliJ is worth the extra money. Especially since Eclipse keeps crashing, too.
(Posting anonymously because this is not widespread knowledge in the company yet)
And some prima-donna developers will presumably find themselves without a job after a couple of resignations based on the code-editor they were required to use.
I'm glad to see that (F)OSS is making an impact, even if it means that a company has to give away their software. I know that this might put a lot of jobs at risk, which is bad, but maintaining a false-economy-based business model as a welfare system is, I tend to assume, more harmful to the overall economy. Plus there's always the option to release advanced tools under a paid-for license, as well as the paid-for support contract.
Why is this bad?
If the tool is anything like their website, with all of its "pointless Flash animations" and lack of clearly laid out comparison tables, then I'd be glad if it died. I'd probably also understand the people who wanted to quite over a change of IDE if that was the one they were being moved to!
I'm surprised we haven't seen this yet. You get to use $AWESOME_COMMERCIAL_IDE for free, in exchange for the occasional add automatically inserted into your code as a comment.
Or maybe your product just sucks.
No-one wants your editor with an integrated chat program.
WAH.
How we know is more important than what we know.
... we are all richer as we get for free functionalities that would cost thousands of dollar without open source.
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
I wonder, then, how come Microsoft still manages to sell gazillions of copies of Visual Studio, even when they also give away "express" editions of their products too.
I want a new quote. One that won't spill. One that don't cost too much. Or come in a pill.
Do it yourself, because no one else will do it yourself. [beta blockade 10-17 Feb]
No wonder nobody buys your stuff. Your online presence gives me the creeps. Quite literally actually. I feel sick watching that presentation and listening to that irritating music. I wouldn't download your tool for free, let alone buy a product from a software company that presents itself like that. No f*ckin' way. And I'm a guy that actually does buy software.
How about wasting 5 minutes on a concept for an online presence and an online marketing strategy? And, please, *do* get a *professional* webdesigner to rebuild the site. You'll find plenty of them here.
To be honest, somebody who needs to get a job done nearly cares squat wether a tool is free or costs 300$. It's only because the 300$ tools are just as crappy as the free ones (sic!) that they settle for the free ones. And damn the few bucks I have to shell out for it.
Best example: Zend Studio and PHP Eclipse or PDT Eclipse. If I have to go through the same fuss configging local remote debuggin in either, I see no point in spending 300$ for Zend Studio. That way I'll even learn to configure an open source tool - a skill not wasted - rather than learning to deal with some quirks of some prorprietary tool.
Counterexample: Mint is a web presence statistics tool with PHP backend logic. There are like a quarter bazillion of these in Free, FOSS and public domain scatterd all over the web. However, looking at this guys site (he happens to be a good designer *and* a good programmer) I haven't the slightest doubt that his statistics tool will deliver without hassle. Thus whenever I need a statistics tool, he'll be the first and last where I look for it.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
They're not the first people to release a free personal edition, but they HAVE found a way to get free advertising on Slashdot.
If a tool is very good, people will pay for it. OSS is, for the most part, "good enough", so if your tool is just "okay", it can't compete.
OSS is just killing the "me too" market for mediocre software.
Well perhaps if I can find a Commercial IDE which isn't doesn't have every bell and whistle under the sun and doesn't eat resources like an old SUV then I would gladly use it, until then I'll use open source alternatives at least if I don't like it I don't get a bad after taste of having just spent all this money on some awful product.
Surely the answer is to offer something that's of value? If the value of the tool is greater than its cost, then I'll look at it. I can't see that much value in distributed programming tools: our distributed team works fine with IRC, Perforce, code review and email. We've tried software aimed at distributed teams before and always fallen back to our old system because it's easier and it works everywhere.
For example: there's an expensive, commercial ARM compiler despite the existence of GCC. People buy it because it generates code that's ~20% smaller and faster.
The real reason people have trouble selling commercial Editors, IDE's, and Compilers is because they charge to much. Many if not most programmers get this thing in their head that once they have written one program, they should never have to work again. They charge over $100- and in some cases over $500- for a compiler or editor and then expect a small company with 3 or 4 developers to buy a full license for every developer and every computer that developer uses.
Even in a small company with 2 developers/engineers, this can often mean that they need 8 licenses.
1 for each developer/engineer for their primary machine = 2 licenses
1 for each developer/engineer for their home machine = 2 licenses
1 for each developer/engineer for their notebook = 2 licenses
1 for each test lab machine = 2 licenses
In total, we are now looking at 8 licenses for 2 blokes, when in reality only one of them will ever be using it at a time anyway.
Then they put a myriad of protection and security in there which makes it a pain to install, maintain, or move.
Then we need a yearly maintenance fee for each license to get bug fixes. With 8 licenses, we need 8 maintenance fees. Even at $100 per license for maintenance, we're now looking at $800- every year just to get bugs fixed!
Assume the Editor costs $250 per license and $100 per year for maintenance (bug fixes), which is about what they charge, with 2 developers/engineers we are now looking at $2,000 for the initial licenses and and additional $800 every year if we want to keep using it or heaven forbid we actually expect it to work. If course, they claim that we get "features" with the maintenance, but most of the time we don't want "features", we just want the product to keep working. Yeah, I know, they'll add support for Windows-Vista or another feature which is neat, but instead of looking at that work as a way of expanding their market, they tend to look at it as a way of lockin or bleeding their existing customer base. This is at the very core of what is wrong with software and the mindset that programmers of software development tools end up with.
Here's a tip for you guy's who do make good tools.
WE WANT TO BUY THEM.
- price them reasonably
- license them reasonably
WE WANT YOU TO STAY IN BUSINESS.
- we will tell all of our friends
- we will tell all of our associates
- we will tell the next generation
- features and fixes generate new customers
WE NEED TO MAKE A LIVING TOO.
- we can't bleed our customers
- we need to write a new program every month or two
- slash the price you charge me to fix your problems
- we can't afford the prices you guys are asking/expecting
Look at the prices for Micro$haft compilers and tools. They quickly run into the thousands of dollars. Borland has also lost the plot and charge an obscene amount of money for their products. Very few of us have customers with unlimited budgets. Very few of us actually want to cheat and buy "Accademic" versions. We are programmers and developers too. We know that it takes you time and you need to eat, but fair is fair, you guys are providing spanners. If you make a good one, you can sell thousands of them, but don't try to retire just because you've made one spanner. The world doesn't work that way anymore.
What Open Source has essentially done is say, "You must be at least this tall to publish a tools suite." Pretty much the only compilers that died were the bad ones. No one, for example, laments the passing of Whitesmiths.
As for editors, well, it was pretty obvious 20 years ago that the editor that was powerful and platform-independent (so you didn't have to re-learn everything and re-write all your macros on a new platform) was going to win. That pretty much meant either EMACS or VI.
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
Also Home fucking kills prostitution!
and people who'd rather quit their job, than embrace new technology, are no loss IMHO
The MAFIAA is a bunch of mindless jerks who will be the first up against the wall when the revolution comes
- charge for support
- charge for customization
- get free QC
- use all the other free tools out there for your own development
In other words, sell software as a service, not as a product.weirdest thing I ever saw: scientology advertising on slashdot.
Either make your product a lot better, so people want to pay for it, or switch to selling an other product.
Privacy is terrorism.
People are plenty willing to pay for tools, even just code editors. MS makes a pretty penny from Visual Studio, and TextMate is considered the must-have editor on the Mac. The real lesson is that there are plenty of open source tools for basic tasks, you have to offer something unique in terms of integration or usability to be a commercial success. Sounds like this company is upset that their "good enough" tools can't compete with free tools that are also "good enough".
Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
I pay for a dev environment, the one from JetBrains, for Java development. I do that because: I loath eclipse: it's a god-awful, slow, clunky, everything that's wrong with open-source GUIs, editor. Second because I need support for code completion, api prompts/look-up and my favourite editor (TextMate) doesn't support that, although it's great for everything else. So I pay a couple of hundred GBP for a decent editor that it doesn't hurt to use. Bad workmen only blame their tools because they chose crappy ones to use. I pay for quality.
Bad analogies are like waxing a monkey with a rainbow.
A riddle:
If Ctrl + O opens a file, what does Caps Lock + Ctrl + O do?
I have to correct myself:
"and people who'd rather quit their job, than embrace new technology, are no loss" is wrong - this is only the case, if you have competent decision makers, who decide to embrace real improvements, instead of buying bullshit-bingo products
The MAFIAA is a bunch of mindless jerks who will be the first up against the wall when the revolution comes
Given that some of the most prominent OSS developers have no problem using proprietary tools, the only reason these guys are going out of business is because they suck.
If an OSS tool has been developed that is better than yours its because yours sucked in the first place, a straight clone of a proprietary product won't get anywhere, there has to be plenty of room to improve and the improvement has to be worth the effort.
IranAir Flight 655 never forget!
There are just a couple of IDE's that are considered best of breed, and most other ide's have a niche capability that eventually get built into one or the other.
The real issue is that open source does not innovate, it copies. There is no financial incentive for a developer to spend countless hours on a new niche capability when there is no reward at the end.
Socialist/marxist utopian dreams aside, the reality is there is no reward that puts food on the table, or pays off a student loan.
So innovation suffers.
For example, Intellisense that Microsoft introduced in 1996, was a real innovation. All others are just copies. Someone was paid (handsomely) to produce intellisense.
I'm still working on a clever footer.
Putting the quote in context(which is allowed under fair use)
"Unfortunately for us, that wasn't meant to be. The tools market is dead. Open source killed it. The only commercial development tools that can survive today are the ones that leapfrog open source tools. With UNA Collaborative Edition, we have that--there's nothing for real-time collaborative development that even comes close, whether commercial or open source. But UNA Personal Edition is more of an incremental improvement on what's out there in the editing world. "
So commercial software has to be a LOT better than opensource to survive not merely a little better.
So whats the problem with that??? If you want to make lots of money...quit your bellyaching and INVENT,INNOVATE and INSPIRE!
Boo fucking hoo.
If your software is good enough and better than the FOSS alternatives, people will pay for it (bit like music).
It looks like a Windows app, so how FOSS editors are effecting sales of that I don't know - most FOSS people don't develop on/for Windows, and most Windows developers I'd say probably use VisualStudio (by choice or corporate policy).
I bet now its free-of-charge (not as in speech or opensource) people still won't use it!
#include <sig.h>
I've never heard of these people but giving away free versions is more likely to get people buying full versions. I would think tools is the one area where companies can make money, Adobes tools for Flash spring to mind...
Visit ssjx.co.uk
The point of his article was to get free advertising . Nobody would ever have heard of his shitty editor before this article.
But now, by sparking some debate and getting to front page of Slashdot, people will be trying it out. I don't care about your shitty editor and I never heard about it. kthxbye
Sorry to disappoint, but to write good code (C, C++, Java, etc) all you need is vi and ctags, and a brain that can remember things for more than a couple of minutes. Besides, if there was one tool that was immensely superior to the others then there wouldn't be so much competition in the tool market. And vendors wouldn't feel obliged to give their perfect solution away for free.
Where's the news? This is a slashvertisement for dzone.com (twice, actually) and a dying, primitive programmer's text editor.
The linked-to article about "Enerjy" says it in no uncertain terms - there were no sales for this type of product. There was also an overbearing impetus within the company itself that free/open source software could do parts of the job just as well, and they were considering using it themselves. The whole industry of "text editors for programmers" has always been niche, and now is dead. I can't say that Open Source has much to do with it so much as "overwhelming choice".
"Years of work and cutting-edge research went into this editor, and it rivals, even surpasses, commercial editors that are selling for $100, $200, even $400 a pop."
It's an editor. I think that cutting-edge research is pushing it a bit but even $100 a pop seems expensive for what is a glorified text editor. Even if you did make $400 each time, did you really ever think that's going to continue forever?
"First of all, I should mention that UNA is a source code editor, not an IDE. It's a very sophisticated editor, well on the road to becoming an IDE, but it doesn't provide out-of-the-box support for compiling, testing, or debugging."
Point proven. It's a text editor. Designed (supposedly) for programming, that doesn't even have a facility to run a compilation script without "plugins" etc.
"The incremental search in UNA is so novel that we're patenting it. That's right, we're patenting a feature we're giving away for free. The incremental search interface allows you to navigate documents with theoretical maximum efficiency. You can jump to wherever you want in the document by typing just half a keystroke more than the minimum number of characters necessary to differentiate that position from others. You can't do better than that. People were blown away by the incremental search feature of Idea 7.0, but we've got something better than that."
I seriously doubt you will be able to patent such an old and over-used idea. Opera does this in my mail, my contacts, my newsgroups, my notes. Pidgin does it in my chat-histories. I've seen it in any number of programs, quite a lot of them "programmer's editors" or IDE's. It's hardly "novel", I wouldn't be "blown away".
The other reasons he thinks that UNA should win are scarily simple at the least. Dialog boxes that don't say stupid things. Keyboard shortcuts. External actions running in the background. Basically, what he has is the equivalent of a freeware programmer's editor from several years ago.
The screenshots depict an atrociously complicated screen with which (supposedly) people who don't know the program can write a Hello World in five minutes. Whoopee.
So his program dies a death because open-source programs do it better? That's not surprising... the program seems to be at least five-ten years behind. My versions of Visual Basic 3.0 and 4.0 had quite a lot of those features, admittedly only for their own language, but similarly thrash his editor in lots of other places (such as being able to compile without needing a plugin!). And the point is that most programmers now use either command-line tools from a particular favourite GUI or they use the IDE/GUI that came with the language (e.g. VB.net, etc.). If they are using command-line tools, then the GUI can be chopped and changed every month with little hassle as various software is released/updated/etc. And you could have a whole group of people use *whatever the hell interface they want* with the same backend tools and work together on a project.
So the fact that the type of program is dying is not surprising - it's a very volatile, niche market driven by the whims of particular programmers. The fact that his particular program is dying is even less surprising - it doesn't seem to offer anything at all. Certainly not for a pricetag, anyway.
Are we really supposed to shed tears over the lose of any part of his business, let alone that he's "been forced" to release a program for free that he couldn't sell?
I'll build web 2.0 applications with JDK 1.0.2, notepad and MS Access 1.0 so long as they pay my 150/hr USD rate and have low expectations!
Horns are really just a broken halo.
Boo-fucking-hoo.
I guess self-proclaimed capitalists don't like capitalism when they're on the receiving side of it, do they?
Funny coming a day after the wwdc announcement from Apple that one of the most important features for the iphone 3g is... an SDK for writing tools and applications.
He's only bitching because everyone is using Eclipse (or more to the point, not using his IDE).
Comment removed based on user account deletion
OK...ok... So the open source community has some interesting characters, but we're not ALL killers.
At least it's only commercial developer tools this time...
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/04/28/2243232
http://news.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/06/09/1155214
... it's that people won't pay for bad software.
Time was that you could get away with selling crapware because all the alternatives cost money, so it was harder for people to check them out. FOSS alternatives can be checked out for free, so when people hit a speed bump with your product they're likely to just go check them out. And if they're at least as good as what you're selling, people are liable to stay with them.
The lesson? If you want to make money selling software, evaluate the FOSS alternatives just like you would evaluate a competitor, and be sure that there is something about what you're selling that makes it better than what other people are giving away.
Read my blog.
Also, the screenshot on their front page is actually a 1280x1024 image, resized in HTML to thumbnail size, which, of course, usually ends up as a mess of pixels that you don't know what it's supposed to be in the first place. I know, we have bandwidth etc., but come on!
THIS IS THE INTERNET. PLEASE PICK UP YOUR SERIOUS BUSINESS SUIT AT THE FRONT COUNTER.
Perhaps they are not selling anything because when you click on their "buy standalone" link you get:
0: Connection failed to the host localhost.
I'm an EE. We pay for several tools, others are open-source. We pay for several CAD tools, among them: schematic capture, PCB layout and, of course, the various firmware development tools for micros we use. Microchip makes available a non-optimizing compiler and IDE for free, you need to pay if you want the higher powered version.
Some tools are good, some have bugs that will never be fixed, due to vendor lock-in/market share. If open source tools put pressure on these vendors, I'm all for it. Some (not all) vendors are cruising along, continuing to sell tools they acquired when they bought a smaller company, with no intentions of upgrading them. I suspect they may not even have developers who know enough about the tools to really fix anything.
So, vendors; give us good tools worth paying for, and we'll pay you for them. The free ride is over, community-developed tools will eat your lunch, because they do what users want. No surprise there.
The World's Worst Webcomic!
Bzzt, wrong answer :)
If developers would rather quit their job than be forced to use a new editor, companies would accept to pay for any editor. Either you think open source is winning because it's free and imposed by companies, or because it's better quality and chosen by developers. It's certainly a mix of the two as the gratuity help companies accept their developers' preferences, but my view is that the latter is the most important factor. Companies don't care about having to pay a couple hundred dollars if developers can be more productive and satisfied...
These tools are not dead, they've simply been liberated from enslavement!
Invenio via vel creo
For example the .NET tools market is far from dead, simply because in general .NET developers first think like 'Let's see if there's a 3rd party control/tool/lib I can buy for this' and THEN they'll probably think 'perhaps there's an open source variant which can do the same'.
.NET are sometimes successful but in general they're lacking behind commercial products.
This eco system isn't going to go away soon, partly because MS isn't promoting open source that much, as it will hurt them too, and partly also because in general open source projects for
Never underestimate the relief of true separation of Religion and State.
Seems like John De Goes is trolling for FreeHype. (FreeHype is only available to OpenSource naysayers)
Everyone knows there's no money in software. Nor music. Nor literature. It's all free.
These are all things we do in our spare time and give away for free, after we've done our job cleaning toilets.
I would recommend against a career as a software developer as well. Almost all companies that are successful and employ SW engineers are selling something else as their main product, typically some HW. (Printers, routers, wi-fi etc). I can also include hospitals, lawfirms, banks etc.
There are two problems working for this kind of companies for a SW engineer; where the boss is and will always be a HW engineer (Or a physician or an attorney etc)
1. You can *never* be promoted to the top of your company.
2. You are *always* second in line for funding and other resources.
3. Sales people frequently close sales with offers like: "Buy this box, and we will throw in the SW for free" (Because they basically think SW is free), and the SW departments revenue is eroded away.
There are a few exceptions to this, and that is MS and Google, but they probably hire 1% of SW engineers.
don't cut it off www.mgmbill.org
closes
Free is clearly a big advantage for developers...
I don't see which part of this is difficult.
Deleted
While I agree with most of your post, I don't think it's a fair to call it a programmer issue. Maybe a creative person issue... where a painter would like to sell each print at full price, to reflect the sweat that went into the first one... but mostly I think it's a small business person issue.
Often, they think they have something special to sell - after all, they wrote - so they can charge like it's gold. I think that many of the tool vendors spend so much energy on their own products... often focusing narrowly on their clever feature Y... that they really forget there's a ton of competitive alternatives out there. In many instances it would make more sense to try to sell an Eclipse plugin that does clever feature Y and call it done (yes, I'm looking at you, embedded-C toolchain developers).
You see this in many small markets, indeed, even in small countries where company X thinks they have a monopoly of sorts, the price goes up, the service goes down, and customers start looking elsewhere. In hard-goods, that elsewhere became parallel and direct imports, while in this software scenario, we're looking at importing open source into our shops instead. Folks who don't know any better may still buy off-the-shelf, but those of us who need to be competitive to earn our own money will find the better options... be they compilers, office suites, or whatever.
Forget thrust, drag, lift and weight. Airplanes fly because of money.
The way it is now, if there is a killer app, there will be free killer app killer soon enough. So, it means that you can make money on software only for a limited time, as long as "iron is hot". Free Software is all ganged together - its code base can only widen, there is no way to beat it. Therefore, novel strategy would be: plan to make maximal use of FOSS, i.e. double-license Free packages and libraries, buy commercial licenses to allow you to keep your software closed while monopoly lasts, plan to keep control over your product even when it goes free: announce that your company will "open" the product to "green pastures", *soon* (weasel!), to discourage free substitute projects and then release yours into open when you see it's game over. Release new, major, upgraded version, under new trade mark name, once again as closed-,-to-be-open-soon software. Rinse, repeat.
... in frozen thermodynamic Hell). Products consisting purely of information, pretty much everything labeled "IP" (or "pr0n"), follow the same principle.
Information is only valuable while it is fresh, aka "Information wants to be free" (No, ENTROPY wants Information to be free, information is entropy's d/dt. Therefore, trying to keep price of information constantly high works
It even holds true for business of selling service for Free Software: once it is ubiquitous and well-known, with lots of experienced "gurus" out there, you can close your operations, there is no money left in it. After all, providing service is basically selling meta-information about free information.
IMHO, you could go even with Free (only as in "free speech", NOT as in "free beer") from Day 1, using all the goodies it bears: unlimited usage of free software code base, because, after all, even though you are asking for serious money, you respect the license to the letter and provide it all, complete with freedoms and source code!
But, there ought to be someone (or a subscribers' escrow account) with set whole mass of money you planned to make on it, ready to become yours in exchange for novel, fresh copy (copies, if subscription model applies) of it. It'll work ONLY if they trust you that it is worth their while, because there can be no "try before buy", except perhaps an online demo simulation.
When I was at school in the 80's I wanted to be a programmer, work on exciting projects and make good money, looks like that is dead due to open source and free software. Imagine how that would cross over to other services and products. Its not really like steam was replaced by petrol as petrol engines still cost money and people could make a career and living out of it. I wonder how it will pan out in 10 years time. At the moment people build OS projects as a hobby when they are coders by day making money, if that gratis work then becomes the norm is there going to be the next generation of professional coders waiting to build more free software or will it dry up as kids at school will think "why do I want to become a coder, everythings free so I aint gonna make any money".
I was reading about this company yesterday. They were behind the mystery job challenge, hiring people to work on this very project.
See Opensource Does!! have killer apps.
Do everyone a favor don't become a Software Engineer if you don't enjoy the work. If you enjoy coding/programming/design or being a Software Engineer you'll get promoted as high as you care to (possibly CTO, or CIO which could still possibly lead to a CEO position at some point if that is *really* what you wanted). As for 2 and 3... any one with a brain clearly realizes Software developement is NOT free, but once its developed well you can produce as many copies as you want. Why is this so hard to grasp?
Ultraedit seems to be very much alive. More than likely due to its excellent feature set and very reasonable pricing.
Open source is not killing commercial software, open source is killing over-priced commercial software.
John De Goes was being a bit overly dramatic. While its true that many tools and applications have free and open-source versions now, it doesn't mean that open-source has "killed" commercial tools. Case in-point is IntelliJ IDea, a commerical tool that is chosen over Eclipse (an open-source product) by many developers including some of the top Java developers in the field, as seen at a recent Spring conference. I would argue that it is by far a much better tool than IDea because it didn't try to be everything to everybody as Eclipse does.
Guess John De Goes' dream of becoming the next Bill Gates is on hold...
Jeez, we have great slashdot here: take the most controversial words out of a 4 pages article, and makes it the title, even though they represent nothing. TFA mostly focus on giving UNA a great exposure, and as such, it is interesting, but all of this has really little to do with "open source killed something".
Ok, if he knows that developers will rather quit their job then switch their IDE, why does he think he even has a business selling IDEs? It's a horrible idea to make and market a product that you know someone will put their livelihood on the line to avoid using (and they don't even have to buy it, the company does that not the developer).
What's that part about selling "really good" code editors, when there is (and has there been) VIM for almost 2 decades now and vi since 1975? Once you learn vi/vim no other editor can't compete any more, so it has to be a dumb editor for "programmers" who don't want to commit to learning a lifelong skill instead...
As the island of our knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance.
So, if they can't sell a product which isn't better than freely available alternatives, that means the tools market is dead? They just produced an editor which doesn't have enough distinguishing features to be marketable and complain the market being dead? To me that sounds like the market is live and functioning as it should be.
A merely average commercial product will loose to an average free product. An excellent commercial product (see Intel's compilers) will do just fine against a free product when it produces better results.
Their product is not a simple programming editor. It's a full featured collaboration editor, which means more than one people can edit the same file, at the same time and everyone can see the changes. Comparing it to, say, Vim or TextMate, is unfair, 'cause none of those tools offer such functionality.
At the same time, one has to wonder: How many times two or more programmers edit the same file at the same time?
My experience says: very few times. Most of the times, they are different changes (e.g., I'm working on something and they dude next to me is editing the same file, but fixing another bug.) And, when that happens, the SCM tool will complain about conflicts or simply do the merge and that's it. I guess I'd be freaking annoyed if text on my screen start changing around; it would completely kill my (short) attention spam.
Instead, it seems like open source software is the exception instead of the rule. In every other industry, the privileged rulers take what was created by society, then resell it to the new generation - the rulers then enjoy increasing standards of living while everyone else treads water at best, or sinks further down at worst.
At least in the US for the last three decades, the distribution of wealth and amount of work hours an average citizen works would support this idea.
They're just upset that there are better alternatives out there for free or, if something is missing, a company can add it to the open source solution without having to wait for some commercial company to get around to adding it.
I personally wouldn't use N-Brain and it's not because of an open source alternative, I simply don't like the look of their site. That is honestly enough to put me off the software completely.
I still buy updates to JCreator ( http://www.jcreator.com/ ) as it is a very good Java IDE. I use Eclipse too but mainly for EJB stuff and JCreator for plain old Java. JCreator is fast and bug free. Sometimes it just makes life easier to open it up rather than wait for Eclipse to fart about trying to load all the plugins.
Last year, my company has bought an licence for the DFSee, the disk utility tool. Well, it's actually swiss knife disk utility tool, and it's great. It's small, it's fast, it's so detailed that I have learned a few new things about file systems. There are no open source tools, and as far as I have seen, no other commercial ones that support all the file systems it supports and in such a detail.
So, in a world of gazillion editors, your editor has no success? Surprise, surprise. Well then, why don't you make something else? Competition is a tough world, in which the fittest survive. Maybe you're not the one?
Eric: "What're quantum mechanics?"
Rincewind: "I don't know. People who repair quantums, I suppose."
Expensive tools are dead. You will never see IBM charging $4,000 for a copy of WSAD. But if they are asking for a lot less, it's still possible. MyEclipse is just such an example. It makes my other free tools work better together. I pay the $30 year after year without compliant.
It requires all participants to be omniscient.
Capitalist economics is a shell game? I strongly disagree but I will go with it for the purposes of discussion. (I believe capitalism does a damn fine job of allocating resources efficiently)
Question for you: what is the alternative?
What is the utopian economic vision you have in mind? If capitalist economics sucks, then what is the "right" model, in your mind? Please enlighten us.
I have been in the software business for a couple decades and I have to tell you, 3rd party tools are typically crap. Open Source/free Software is generally better in quality and, of course, price.
The issue is the investment in using the tools. There is always a learning curve with a new tool. The 3rd party tools typically have crap for documentation and few examples. They almost never out perform the readily available alternatives.
For things like editors, that is a personal choice for many developers. The tools you are used to often make you more productive than new tools with features. I have found it is best to be a minimalist as you can't always have your editor of choice everywhere you work, but vi runs everywhere.
I remember the problems setting up "brief" on every machine years back. After having to do it for several years, I just got sick of spending the time. The vi editor is in every UNIX system and can run on Windows as well.
For things like debuggers, there are some pretty cool features, but I can still get the job done just as fast with printf and gdb.
for things like libraries, that market is dead. In fact, except for a few rare examples, there has never really been a big market. Also, libraries have a double hit in that there is the inevitable learning curve, plus their bugs become your bugs. Open source/free software is a win here as there is almost always a larger development environment around the technology.
I've never found any of the for pay development tools to be worth much at all. If they wanted that market share, then they should have made better tools. The fact that we (as a community) were so fed up with their offerings that we actually went out and built them ourselves expresses just how out of touch the industry really is.
They're charging too much for what they are providing.
If a $5,000/year tool saves you $10,000/year of developer time, the price is just fine. An $800/year tool that provides a $200/year benefit over a free alternative? Not so much.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Open source didn't kill commercial developper tools, Visual studio did.
IBM, SUN etc had zero interest in open-sourcing any development tool till Microsoft started seeding the market with dirt-cheap Visual Studio copies and using them to push Microsoft-specific techs.
Of course it's safer to rant about open source commies than about the big bad nasty monopolist.
No kidding. That site is just horrible, it looks like it's going to give you spyware and have all sorts of JS-crap on it.
Maybe if they spent more time branding their stuff nicely (one area where the commercial companies can really beat OSS) they'd do better in this apparently competitive market.
The quality and usefulness of an open source application will be generally better if there is no ulterior motive behind it. When developers write code they themselves actually are users of, you can't get closer to understanding the use cases. You can't get much more synchronized than IDEs. Admittedley, some times a developer mindset produces a highly useful project with an interface style only a programmer would love, and it can hamper an otherwise good program for the common user, but IDEs...
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
I have found that Open Source has become an important market force pushing proprietary software vendors harder to create more reliable, more compelling, and overall 'better' products.
The ecosystem has evolved fairly well in many cases. IBM is an interesting case study. They've spent what to most of us would be considered a dozen fortunes (and is to IBM a pittance) supporting the Eclipse platform. They still have many full time IBM employees who are dedicated to working on this entirely free and open source project. They do this because it is to IBM's benefit for that project to exist and to be a good tool. By donating resources, IBM gets input into how it goes together. IBM then uses that open source project as part of some of its solutions which support their other proprietary software. Its working well for everyone so far as I know.
The third party tools market can be good or bad depending on many things. Open Source is a very positive market force in getting rid of the over priced garbage put out by a couple of mid-skilled programming hacks in a couple of afternoons. I find a real scourge of these attached to the Microsoft development community. It has always seemed as though every idiot and his brother has some neat little tool they badly cobble together and then sell for a ridiculous price and don't support. For those tools, Open Source is a death sentence -- and we're all the better for it.
Open source isn't replacing the software vendor. High quality vendors still do exist and are thriving. The games industry, operating systems (yes, I love Linux too - but its not going to replace all desktops any time soon) vertical markets, and other very highly specialized or highly complex and long term development projects are well served by the professional software industry. They require highly skilled professional programmers -- many of whom learn and practice their skills in the much more dynamic and creative -- and more important, peer critical -- open source arena.
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
MS was the cheapest game in the town, till Linux came about.
Similarly for other cheap products.
What i find curious is that in most historical cases like those quoted here, the technology/industry that has been usurped still always managed to produce jobs and profit as the new technology required newly skilled workers. That however is not the case in software. People are doing it for free in their spare time and there is absolutely no way that commercial software can really compete. As a software i am pleased that open source exists, but i am also painfully aware that we're actually killing our own job prospects by undermining a large part of our own industry.
...seem to be centered around whether or not this is actual progress to sell tools for free.
I think this is entirely missing the point.
Nobody has pointed out so far that the tool sets come with the source code.
This is one reason why commercial tools cannot compete with open source.
No source=innovation at a snails pace.
Companies cannot compete against the large number of available engineers on the internet.
Something else to consider is motivation.
When people see a tool they want to fix right in the commercial space they may tell the company about it, but ultimately the company will decide if a bug gets fixed, or a feature gets added.
That is a fundamental disadvantage when a developer using a open source tool can rebuild the tool with his feature added, by himself.
Usually passion is what drives the developer and practical need rather than a marketing plan to make these changes.
So the engineering, the fundamental design tends to improve or be a lot better with open Source projects.
Then of course there is shame. When I publish code on the internet, it is no where NEAR the crap I keep privately. My database tables are always properly indexed and in correct normalized form as well as the API and code that follows very good java doc api rules and correct object design methodologies. (I am a fan of the Yourdon method. Not surprising, he is also one of my favorite authors.)
Then there is the fact that it doesn't take much to make a patch from a subversion source tree. It is easy.
All in all though, this simply means more writing on the wall that selling software as a license per copy cannot be the only way to generate revenue, and the market continues to move in that direction.
Exclaiming that the sky is falling simply because a particular company wants the world to stand still and do "business as usual" is not an excuse to whine about open source.
-Hack
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
"0: Connection failed to the host localhost." When trying to download their product.
loop
{
There is an effort to make rare things !rare result is things are available
but then !rare things don't have the same value
so again there is an effort to make things rare
}
If you are going to make a tool that you can profit on, you have to innovate. Right now, the old tricks of text editing and syntax highlighting are boring because developers have gotten used to them. I'm working on a closed source development product for Windows (*) [while Open for Linux] and, my whole approach is to try and do something totally different. If I'm successful, I hope to get enough shareware money to pay credit card bills and maybe work full time on my own projects for a year or two.
If you are just doing the old stack with a slightly snazzier editor, those days are gone. You have to do something different, you might want to think about language and you might even think about domain specificity. But there's room out there for both and if the closed source people are successful, and profitable, it only allows the open source people to use that funded development as a working requirements document for a more open implementation. I honestly hope that I write something that is good enough for the FOSS people to rip my ideas off, because, god knows, I'm going to rip them off too. IT's the composition that counts, not the paragraphs. I hope that makes some sense.
This is my sig.
Everyone in your example is making an informed, rational decision except for you. Why would the management invest $200 in saving you a week of overtime when they don't have to pay you for it? Also, if $200 is worth less to you than your week of unpaid overtime, you should have bought the tool and used it on your own. I hope that having this pointed out to you triggers an epiphany--the only irrational actor in the free market here was you.
In a vacuum, that's perhaps true, but nothing is. It's the economics equivalent of one of those first year physics problems where you pretend all projectiles are perfect spheres and encounter no wind resistance.
For example, maybe the poster would have done something else useful for his employer during the non-overtime time that he wasted with the inferior tool, something that would have been worth more than $200.
Or, maybe it drives the poster to change jobs and work at a company that will actually pay for the tools it takes for him to be most productive. I've done exactly that in my own career. Time spent as a developer trying to solve some business problem with code is fulfilling to me; time spent as a developer wrestling with a shitty tool is not. I guarantee that the costs involved in finding and hiring a replacement developer are more than $200.
(For the record, I've worked for a company that insisted on non-free tools for everything, and I've worked for a company that refused to play for anything. They're both wrong.)
You know... the whole String library in C/C++ has drove me nuts. I took AP C++ (the last year it was C++, it's Java now) and used Borland Turbo C++ in all its 16 bit glory. There were two prerequisite programming classes before you could take AP C++. The first year in intro C++, we used mostly char arrays for enforcing pointers and arrays and such, but we were introduced to string.h. In advanced C++, we used string.h. In AP, we used apstring.h. Then, I get to college and we're using the standard namespace string. I think somewhere in there was a strings.h, even. Then I stumble across the boost libraries. Oh, yeah, and then the win32 API lpzStr or whatever Hungarian notation it had.
To be completely honest, I found string.h the most usable of all the libraries. It was straight forward and you knew you were holding live dynamite in your hand. If you went outside the bounds, you blew your leg off. It was a simple indexable array and after I use more and more libraries with NIH syndrome, I really miss the simplicity of a simple string.h. I even find myself constantly doing a myString.c_str() cast constantly when I use C++ these days because it's the only thing that's really compatible with everything else, for sure. I'm so sick of string libraries and pre-parsing before I can parse. OK, sorry for that rant, but it's been brewing for a while now. And I'll save up my VB6 variant rant for another day.
If I mod you up, it doesn't necessarily mean I agree with what you've said, sorry.
J: "It's better when it's free?"
D: "No, it's performed on cold dark nights, alone and behind a computer screen."
- I can fix up minor stuff that get in the way if I have to (including the existence of a community that's positive around this and can accept fixes back). This is a big insurance - I don't have to do it that often, but it makes me comfortable.
- The free tools are generally nicely packaged for the operating systems I use (through FreeBSD ports or Linux packaging systems or as Mac DMGs)
- There is no hassle around licensing. We're both allowed to do what we want to do without getting more permission, and there's not copy protection to get in the way.
- There is a community that gives good support.
The money in itself is of fairly little importance; we're spending a lot of money on salaries and servers and bandwidth and offices, so throwing in a few thousand (or tens of thousands) here and there for software would not be that big a deal. However, the money should be well spent - and missing the features above often makes the commercial offerings worse than the free ones.Eivind.
Doubting the existence of evolution is like doubting the existence of China: It just shows that you're uninformed.
From the article it seems like they are using some FOSS-tools themselves:
But for any language supported by Exuberant CTags, we offer much broader functionality, which includes structure views, object hierarchy views, go to declaration, parameter hinting, and so on.
So don't blame the gaints whose shoulders you are on that the air is so thin...
1 for each developer/engineer for their primary machine = 2 licenses
1 for each developer/engineer for their home machine = 2 licenses
1 for each developer/engineer for their notebook = 2 licenses
1 for each test lab machine = 2 licenses
In total, we are now looking at 8 licenses for 2 blokes, when in reality only one of them will ever be using it at a time anyway. I know MS tools best and virtually none of your points apply to them. To start with they're per developer head not per install - in your example you'd need exactly 2 licenses for 2 blokes. No copy protection. Free 'express' edition downloads. etc.
And "we'll tell all our friends"? Are all of your friends developers??? The market for dev tools isn't anywhere near as big as say for office tools.
"Some developers would rather quit their job than be forced to use a new editor or IDE."
i don't see what this has to do with open source. seems like tools developers have two problems: cheap substitute goods, plus a lack of a market in the first place...
This is the same "killing" like when Firefox is killing Internet Explorer and then they explain Explorer is up to 78% of the market while FF is up to 20%?
To be honest, collaboration tools aren't anything new. I recall that several years ago, Sun Microsystems released Java Studio Enterprise (can't remember the version) that boasted of the ability to collaborate on projects -- even allowing multiple developers to simultaneously edit the same class file. It additionally had the same chat features that were mentioned in this "UNA-cycle" software. I recall grabbing a version of that software for free from their website.
Surprisingly, as Sun moved on to endorse NetBeans, I haven't seen a plug-in for NetBeans that provides the same collaboration features (correct me if I'm wrong). What happened? Nevertheless, the collab tool WILL appear someday and once again, we'll receive complaints from De Goes, et al. The important thing is that as open-source communities, we are practicing unity and demonstrating that together we can develop products that rival proprietary business applications.
I've been programming professionally since 1982, and while I havn't personally paid a penny for software tools for about a decade (since RedHat 5.0), I can say that the declining/disappearing market for software tools predates that, and I see the reason as being integrated IDEs starting with Borland Turbo Pascal.
In the early days I remember paying a lot of money for tools like Watcom-C (32 bit DOS/4GW development - $895 - the hottest optimizing compiler of the day), Instant-C (C interpreter for rapid prototyping/debugging - $695?), BRIEF ($195 - one of the best commercial editors ever - I still use BRIEF-compatible Emacs key assignments), some profiler I can't even remember the name of, etc, etc.
When Borland Turbo Pascal was introduced it completely changed the software tool pricing landscape. This was a very high performing comiler, with an IDE that included tools that would otherwise have been seperate (editor, debugger, profiler), all for a ridiculously low price (WikiPedia says $49.99 - I'd forgotten). While the integrated editor/etc may not have been as good as stand-alone alternatives, it was good enough for many people and pretty much spelt the death of multi-hundred dollar a la carte tools. The performance of the Borland compiler also forced Microsoft (who's optimization in the early days wasn't very good) to up their game which also helped kill the market for non-IDE optimizing compilers.
More recently of course Linux and open source tools have kept some competetive pressure on the tools market, but I really see Borland as being the start of the end for a market for software tools at prices that make them an attractive proposition for dedicated tools vendors.
To start with, there's no requirement that a society needs to be capitalist to use a working free market. There's no inherent contradiction in having a free market in a socialist society, for example - the thing that would define such a society as socialist would be how capital is allocated, while the selection of providers of services and products could be left to the free market.
Personally I'm a strong believer in socialized medicine, for example, but at the same time I wouldn't see a problem with a system where private providers competed for the "business" of people needing treatment, while the base payment is provided by government. After all, the goal of socialized medicine isn't for the state to run hospitals, it's for the state to guarantee a certain level of medical services to all.
You may notice that most European countries operate somewhere along a scale from completely government operated services, to a hybrid model. Some indeed shows signs of both - the UK National Health Service is one of the largest employers in the world, with 1.3 million employees (depending on who you believe and how you count it's it could be considered the 4th largest employer in the world after the Chinese Army, Walmart and Indian national Railways), at the same time a lot of services are outsourced to private companies, and both GP's and dentists that gets some or all of their income from the NHS compete for business.
I'm politically far to the left of the sitting UK Labour government, yet I actually wish they'd open up larger parts (most) of the NHS to free market pressures, as long as they keep their eyes on the goal of providing top quality healthcare for everyone.
In fact, some would argue that a lot of government intervention that they support should be done in the form of markets. CO2 quotas being one example: Create a competition driven market to achieve the government goals rather than set hard requirements, as it acts as an incentive for innovative solutions that you're unlikely to have thought of from the outset.
But apart from all of this, which is not dependent on a capitalist society (to make that clearer: none of this require private ownership of capital even - a free market can still function in a society where all actors are private citizens or publicly owned companies instead of privately owned), a free market is only effectively allocating resources when two conditions are met:
Looking at for example the cellphone and broadband markets you see a classic example of when more regulation actually contribute to more competition, because it prevents monopolies from strangling the market:
Several European countries have extensive unbundling of services baked into their laws. In Norway, for example, the network operators are required by law to offer unhindered access to their networks by third parties at "cost plus" terms (they can charge their cost plus up to a certain margin), and at the same time all operators are limited as to how long contract periods they can require as part of handset bundles.
This has created a massively competitive market for operators, with a large number of "virtual operators" that don't own their own network, and at least one operator with only a limited network that depends on roaming in rural areas. In all I believe there are more than 40 GSM and 3G operators in Norway, with a population of about 4 million. That's a testament to successful re
Oracle seem good at doing that. They have a nice tool, JDeveloper, that is free to use. You can use it to generate portable apps, but there are a lot of Oracle extensions that make things easier.
If you use these you have to run on oracle application server (non-free) or pay a fee to use their runtime on another platform.
Take Eclipse for example. Look at how many commercial tools are built on top of it.
At work we use MyEclipse which is a $30/year subscription. It is mostly a package of open source extensions with a few proprietary closed-source ones.
Commercial tools no longer have to do all the work of building an IDE, they just have to create extensions on top of Eclipse.
#!/
1 for each developer/engineer for their primary machine = 2 licenses
1 for each developer/engineer for their home machine = 2 licenses
1 for each developer/engineer for their notebook = 2 licenses
1 for each test lab machine = 2 licenses
Does one individual dev really need to install the suite on three different computers when they can just install it on a notebook and be done with it?
Typical supply side control freak thinking. The tools market of course is alive, more alive than ever. Bigger than ever, with more and more complex needs than ever, with more money than ever, delivering more value than ever. The vast array of tools is blindingly evident, new ones, with more output into more working software than ever, more users, tools everywhere you look but still they demand "MORE!"... It's the tools vendors who are the walking dead.
Because these tools vendors work from that most common commercial fallacy: the supply side power trip. People who say "hmmm, I've got this thing, now who will buy it?", not "who wants something, and how do I give it to them?" People who think of the market as their servant, customers like sheep to fleece, or really that they're doing customers a favor by serving them.
The reality of successful commerce is to find what people in markets want, and then find ways to give it to them. Ways that send value to the market that's recognized enough to expect value delivered back to the vendor, measured in money.
There's lots of ways to do that, depending on the specific market and what it wants, how it's delivered, and what the vendor will take in return. But here's something that hasn't occurred to these tools vendors: their tools are ways of communicating with APIs. The tools contain expertise in those APIs, automated for the tool user. If tool vendors really sold subscriptions to their API expertise, they could capture an audience. A grand "API support" system, that included help desks (by email/web/phone), training, seminars, reference documentation and source code, training with executable libraries, and yes, the tools. Give away the tools, open the source, invite the community into the tools source development. That ecosystem is worth real money to serious developers who make money from them (and serious hobbyists who take their hobby seriously). Giving away the tools that support their API support, in their specific style, with their specific tool APIs, would harvest all those people who need help. Every copy of their tool that people share for free should have a 1-click (or commandline) that connects them to commercial support, for a fee (though giving away a few sessions is also good marketing).
The tools market will of course only grow, as the industry globalizes, and gains ever more value through the "network effect". Tools vendors aren't the prom queen anymore, since tools development is so wide open, built on the underlying open source OS'es and apps (and other tools). They have to cater to the real needs of the market. For which this huger, richer market will pay. But not anymore because they're just told to pay. Now the vendors have to ask, nicely, with gifts. Or they're as dead as they say the market is now.
--
make install -not war
If the market would be dead no one would be buying software tools which is simply bogus. Just look at IDEA and the way they still manage to expand despite the heated competition from both NetBeans as well as Eclipse. So dead? Nonsense.
Only real change I do see is that its getting harder and harder to become a new serious player on the market since it would take quite the investment. Its cheaper to develop something through an open source project than to hire your own programmers.
But depending on the license being used its even cheaper to fork an IDE project, add your own super-duper extensions to it and try to sell that. Or hasn't anyone looked into that option because they gave up prior to actually trying?
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
The big question here is what happens when the commercial vendors of this stuff are gone?
What happens when no one pays for the usability testing that so often the open source software guys can't afford? Right now that's fine. There's a commercial version whose vendor did the usability testing to copy. (look at window managers for example.. 'ooh I can skin it to look like a 'mac' or 'windows'... both of whom spend millions and take years making sure that the placement/feel etc of icons work for the average user only to have the open source guy jump out shrug and say "that's nothing I can copy that in an afternoon". But what happens when there's nothing to copy? When the user testing is done by every poor guy who's downloading the thing and just needs to get some work done?
And think about the IDE situation. Eclipse is a special case that was effectively created by IBM, not some rogue group of "for the people" programmers, but IBM. And they wanted to make inroads into a developer market that was at the time leaning heavily microsoft sure but more they wanted a single, non-microsoft, platform they could develop on and for so that they didn't have to deal with 2, 10, or even a hundred open source IDE's competing for dominance. Instead they created eclipse as a foundation on which they could put many of their products (like many of the Rational line) and by doing so have to target only one environment. They eliminated licensing fees and internal development costs for the tool now sharing that burden with a number of other companies in the 'eclipse foundation'. It's pure genius. They eliminate 100's of millions in licensing fees worldwide and the need for all the developers they would otherwise have to hire to maintain the tools internally all while making sure a steady stream of fanatic OSS developers are familiar with the platform for both using and developing rational tools. Even better than vastly redusing the costs then sharing what's left with other companies is that many people will actually donate their time to doing fixes etc so that IBM doesn't have to pay anything at all.
Eclipse is for free, nonetheless IDEA works much smoother, with less hickups. Too bad most
companies won't invest a few hundred bucks for
such a gem.
Capitalist economics is a shell game? I strongly disagree but I will go with it for the purposes of discussion. (I believe capitalism does a damn fine job of allocating resources efficiently)
Question for you: what is the alternative?
What is the utopian economic vision you have in mind? If capitalist economics sucks, then what is the "right" model, in your mind? Please enlighten us.
First off, the way to create a fair and equitable society is to recognize that people are not born free. The real world imposes requirements upon us, and those requirements must be met.
To be strong, self-sufficient and confident individuals, we must meet these needs through the direct application of our own power. We cannot yoke our fellow man like a horse to meet our requirements for us, because doing so strips us of our individuality transforms us into dependent parasites. We must do it ourselves, and we cultivate the capacity to do for ourselves within ourselves, and within each other.
The right economic model to deliver this is communism, without currency. No taxes. All contributions to be paid in labour, all people to contribute to each industry that sustains life to the best of their capacity.
Everyone, from the top to the bottom, does their time in the industries that create our food, our shelter, our power, etc.
This means spending some of your time in the areas you're good at, demonstrating to your peers that you're a skilled asset in that area, and being given the opportunity to lead by those who recognize that you have something to offer that they do not.
It also means spending some of your time in the areas you're not good at, recognizing your limitations, and learning to recognize the people who surpass your limitations so you know who to be led by, for your own self-interest.
This is how you create a self-reliant and informed population.
This would reduce the workload on all people dramatically, because we wouldn't have a vast multitude of people dedicating their entire lives to creating things which do nothing to sustain anyone, but merely titillate the fancy of our ruling class.
Once you have such a strong population of informed individuals, you need a democratic process to allow them to co-operate.
But not a democratic process like we have now. What we see in the world today is a joke, in which we are given a short list of unappealing rulers, and we must choose one who will rule over us for years, with no capacity to change our mind should we be betrayed.
What we need is a democratic process that leaves us always in control of our own political voice, small though it may be in a crowd so large.
Ideally, this would mean direct democracy, in which all people vote directly on all issues, in the fashion of the Romans. But this ideal would require that we have infinite time to inform ourselves, and to gather the opinions of those we trust more than ourselves to answer specific concerns.
So, the way to solve the problem is to allow us to embed expressions of our trust into the system, and have those expressions be under our control.
We allow everyone to vote directly on each issue, and we allow them to choose instead to vote for any individual they wish. If they choose to vote for an individual, that individual gets the extra vote transferred to them, to wield as they see fit.
The "vote", the "transfer of power", this should be revocable at any time, and all votes cast should be part of the public record, with no anonymity. This way, there's no power usurped under false pretenses and wielded in an arbitrary fashion without consequence during some arbitrary political term of office, which is what we see so much of today.
In such a world, people would remain strong individuals, understanding of how their life is maintained. They would have no need to prey on each other. They would have developed as much knowledge, wisdom and experience as
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
When people have a choice between free and expensive they will usually take the free one. Film at 11:00.
You never really know how close to the edge you can go until you fall off.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
I think TextMate and Coda are doing OK. But they're well designed and fairly innovative.
I personally would deeply miss Multi-Edit if it went under. I'm going to buy their latest version, despite it not having the one feature that that I currently have to work around, which is the ability to deal with lines longer than 16k characters.
Interesting article, except N-BRAIN *doesn't* offer an open source (or even no cost closed source) version of UNA. At their website following the given link, all you can find is a single-user trial, and a single-user trial isn't much good when the main product is a realtime collaborative editor. Possibly the press announcement got ahead of the web site guys and the open source version is coming shortly, but it's not there today.
I have a few tools I do not mind paying for at all. They blow the open source versions out of the water right now. BUT, they claim to support linux yet it takes 10 support tickets, 10 phone calls and 4 weeks to get the stupid thing installed.
Their open source counter parts take about 10 seconds to install under Ubuntu.
Getting this message for all platform downloads at http://www.n-brain.net/updates.htm
0: Connection failed to the host localhost.
Any mirrors available?
cheers,
file_reaper
The whole thing about free and open source software is that it works based on what is called a gift economy. A gift economy is an economic system where resources (in this case computing power and memory) are essentially unlimited. In such a system, resources, the primary moving force in the economy of the real world, are essentially valueless. But then, what is to be gained by participating in the society? In such a system, instead of working for resources, individuals work for other forms of gratification such as the joy of the work or the reputation accrued among others in the community. The "gain" of such a system is related to what a person can give back to the community, thus the name "gift economy".
In the real world, the stakes are prosperity and basic survival, and rational actors make distinctly different decisions in such a situation. Thus your argument that the success of free and open source software over commercial enterprises supports the system of communism in general is somewhat fallacious, since the general conclusion does not exist in the same context as the specific example.
A more detailed look at the idea of a gift economy in relation to free and open source software can be seen in Eric Raymond's essay Homesteading the Noosphere. It's essential reading for those interested in understanding free software, along with the other essays in The Cathedral and the Bazaar.
Capitalism, outside of Randian fantasy worlds, has always been marked by government coercion on behalf of the owners of large amounts of capital (hence the name).
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for genuinely free markets, but capitalism is a different beast entirely.
AEIOU: open-source anonymous internet currency
The emacs interface was brilliant when I was typing on a TTY with a paper tape reader stuck to the side of it. It's been passe since the SuperBee was invented.
I've used more than a dozen editors (including SOS, TECO, and OSPF) and emacs is just another extensible text editor with obsolete default keybindings. I liked EDT and EVE better.
"Capitalist economics is a shell game? I strongly disagree but I will go with it for the purposes of discussion. (I believe capitalism does a damn fine job of allocating resources efficiently)"
That comment got me thinking: Is there really a need for capitalism and it's "allocation of resources" if the thing we are allocating is practically infinite? When we buy physical goods, we are buying from a limited supply. There's only so many cars, computers, gizmos out there to be bought. And thosethings are made from resources that are finite. Those items are scarse. Some more, some less, but still. And price reflects that.
But what about digital goods? for example, music in mp3-format. There's no scarcity there. You could make thousands of copies of a song, and the price of doing that would be neglible. Do we need capitalism, supply and demand in setting the prices there? Only way those could work is with artificial limitations that would create a "price" for the end-product. But if we abandon those artificial limitations, how could we have a price on those songs, since the supply would be practically limitless?
Lesbian Nazi Hookers Abducted by UFOs and Forced Into Weight Loss Programs - -all next week on Town Talk.
That's assuming the $5000 car doesn't itself need more than $3000 in repairs over the next six months.
Ahahahahah. Brilliant post, sir. Just brilliant. Somebody mod this dude up.
"You can either have software quality or you can have pointer arithmetic, but you cannot have both at the same time."
Apples to cars (hey, a car analogy!).
Are those 10 million excess deaths caused by the capitalistic societies? I'd love to see a breakdown of starvation in the US, Japan, Europe, and Australia, and how they fit into the 10 million.
It's far more likely that those 'excess' deaths were due to government, not trade & capitalism. How many totalitarian governments accept food aid... then stockpile it, preventing distribution to starving communities? Using the lack of food as a weapon against those that might pose any threat to their power?
Take Burma/Myramar. Massive cyclone flooding and damaging countless numbers of villages, with who knows how many dead from the initial storm. Rest of the world came in almost immediately, offering food, aid, and support. All three were restricted, with the ruling Junta preventing entry and help, and taking the supplies given to them. Eventually, they released it to their people, after rebranding everything to try and make themselves look better to the Burmese. Think about that: developed, capitalistic nations jumped right in with help. The Junta basically killed many of their own people by withholding food and water, simply to keep ahold of power.
Yes, there is a lot of food grown. There could be even more created, and some of it is wasted, even in capitalistic societies. But there's still enough to send outside of our borders, in some cases simply as a gift to those caught in a catastrophe. Unfortunately, there's little we can do when those that run other countries do so in an inhumane way. Aside from forcibly removing their blighted existance from humanity via war, but good luck getting buy-in for that.
if "Some developers would rather quit their job than be forced to use a new editor or IDE", then you need to produce something better. Perhaps a "a very good" replacement, regardless of cost, isn't good enough to entice new users.
Many open source projects fail to succeed because everyone working on them is a developer. They design the software to meet their own personal needs. Thus we get projects like the Gimp which does not meet the needs of any artist I have ever known.
However, when it comes to making development tools, who better to know the needs of the end user than other developers? When it comes to software that is used by developers, open source will always be king. Look where the real successes in open source are right now. Most of it is in libraries and frameworks like django, rails, and jquery. These are things made by developers to make developing easier.
Open source will always own that market.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
IIRC, the Microsoft C/C++ 7 development team didn't use their own editor when writing code, and as a result, the supplied editor blew chunks.
The "eating your own dogfood" phrase came about as the slang for the mandate that the MSC editor must be used when developing MSFT products.
Given their UNA product. Does anyone else notice their advertising slogan? "N minds are better than N-1" Why do they call it N-Brain then...?
Disclaimer: I am not god.
We may not be created equal
But we can be treated equal.
Common folks. These are just Java tools. I thought it was something serious. Relax now.
Shhh. Don't give them any ideas!
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
Here is some imparted wisom from another poster, wake up you dopes...
"What i find curious is that in most historical cases like those quoted here, the technology/industry that has been usurped still always managed to produce jobs and profit as the new technology required newly skilled workers. That however is not the case in software. People are doing it for free in their spare time and there is absolutely no way that commercial software can really compete. As a software i am pleased that open source exists, but i am also painfully aware that we're actually killing our own job prospects by undermining a large part of our own industry."
Its more than curious my friend, its tragic
Was alive and well last time I checked. But that's because it is such a great tool.
What is this man talking about - did he make a commercial version of vi or something ? Madness.
Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.
I've found that for every one bad tool, there's at least another that's at least "good".
How many "bad" or "inferior" tools have you used, in reality?
How many of them were actually for-pay tools that was at that $200-500 price point?
The fact of the matter is...there's an unfortunate reality that you're MISSING in your analogy.
There is a type of thinking in the industry that management ends up having in many, many companies. Money comes out of "buckets". Buying your software you're talking to comes out of another bucket than your already budgeted wage or salary. Typically it comes out of the expense or capital purchases bucket, which usually has a limited amount for things like that unless you're in a forward thinking company (There's you a hint!).
So, it's "cheaper" in the short to medium term to waste 1-2 weeks of your productivity over a $200 purchase because you "blew" the other budget all to hell by buying it.
Labor's "cheap" within most medium to large sized companies. Maintenance is "free". I'm seeing it all the time. It's usually because you end up with a manager at one of the middle to upper levels that hasn't a damn clue about how things really get done and they think in terms of producing simple manufactured items and get it all wrong.
In your analogy, if you were working where I am right now, you'd have had two other choices...
1) Find a different tool that was FOSS that DID work.
2) Implement your own version that is proprietary to the employer.
Buying something isn't really an option unless you're in the EE group- unless there really is no other choice available and then there'll be hell to pay. (I'll leave it as a mental exercise for you as to what form the hell will take...)
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
This sounds to me like the concept of social democracy (as opposed to democratic socialism). The distinction is that social democracy tries to achieve socialism in a free market, democratic society, whereas democratic socialism tries to abolish the market in favour of a centrally planned economy. Quite how the democracy fits in I'm not sure, you probably get to vote for who is loosely in charge of the vast armies of bureaucrats actually running the show.
In UK terms, New Labour is social democratic, old labour is democratic socialism.
While there are great tools and languages out there ( Eric, Eclipse are good examples ) i have yet to see something that can compete with Visual Studio, especially for GUI or 'team' development.
OSS tools may be improving by leaps and bounds, but i see just as many commercial ones as i have ever seen, if not more.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I think the guy is bitter because he reinvented the wheel, and now nobody is using his wheel. If he would have created an Eclipse plugin, he wouldn't have had to write the portion of the software that he's now giving away. He could have concentrated on the collaboration part.
Honestly, I don't really get what UNA buys you over the combination of Eclipse, Mylyn, SVN, and an IRC or IM plugin. I can't imagine that I'd want someone typing in the same file I'm working on.
I don't know about the particular tool mentioned in the article, but I do know a bit about developer tools in general, from when there was a bigger market for them
1) They tended to be expensive. Very expensive. Like hundreds to thousands of dollars per seat expensive. Know what the signing authority of your average SW developer is? Right, $0.
2) They really didn't work that well. Consider commercial revision control systems. PVCS and Clearcase do more than CVS, but they were clunky, slow (Clearcase before snapshot views... shudder!), and crash-prone.
3) Often times they came with nasty DRM, either some sort of host-locked license or a network licensing system that was less than 100% reliable.
So, to the subject of the article -- if you're a blacksmith and some company is selling a fancy hammer for what you consider to be a high price, and while it works better than what you've got it's got problems of its own, what can you do? Well, you're a blacksmith -- you can make your own better hammer. Same with software developers. If the tools cost too much or are inferior, we're perfectly capable of making our own tools. That makes us a risky market to begin with.
Add in the inescapable fact that the cost of making copies is darn near zero, and just what do you expect to happen?
If you seriously believe any OSS editor/IDE competes with visual studio you've lost perspective. I strongly suggest you give VS a try and see what we are actually up against. It doesn't help our cause to pretend we've already won battles we haven't. It just makes us look as ignorant and delusional as the microsoft fud machine. bueller.
Windows is a nightmare and yet has predominated the industry. Windows requires more hardware, more security, more software, more labor, and yet it has been the market. Infact, OSS has had a very hard road to hoe against ALL of the commercial stuff because most of the commercial stuff is pre-loaded or sold to companies. Now that a great deal of support is available, and the SCO issue resolved, several large companies are using more of it. But it was not that OSS was superior in nearly everyway that did the trick (actually, it did with the developers), but the issue of superior and cheaper support is what has made OSS possible in the corporate world.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Gee, I'm being paid for working on open source software. Open source doesn't mean "people doing it for free in their spare time".
What's really killing "professional developer tools" isn't open source. It's the fact that it's a business where you're making cabinets for carpenters. It's always been like that... "professional" editors and development environments have mostly been short lived, and a new editor that's only moderately better than what people have now (and that's always been the case for this class of software) is guaranteed to have a short lifespan. If open source didn't copy what you were doing, Microsoft would put it in Visual Studio and Apple would put it in XCode and the result would be the same for you.
The only way you can stay around long term is to build in incompatibilities that lock people into your compiler, like Borland did for many years. If you don't have a compiler, you barely have a product at all.
PS: the ones doing it for free aren't the "whores".
Thanks to FOSS, writing software is now a one-way ticket to being a slave laborer. The true irony is that, for the most part, this situation has actually been pushed by programmers.
Slave screams, he spends his life learning conformity
Slave screams, he claims he has his own identity
Slave screams, he's going to cause the system to fall
Slave screams, but he's glad to be chained to that wall!
don't open your eyes you won't like what you see
the blind have been blessed with security
don't open your eyes take it from me
I have found
you can find
happiness in slavery
The big question here is what happens when the commercial vendors of this stuff are gone?
What stuff?
Development tools? Anything less than a full IDE is pre-doomed, and Microsoft owns the IDE. The only place you could see competition for IDEs was on the Mac, and Apple killed that with XCode. As you say, Eclipse is not an "open source" story, it's an "IBM vs Microsoft" story.
Or software in general? You were talking about window managers... so far as I know there are no proprietary window managers, there haven't been since Motif and CDE died a much-deserved death... because they were *worse* than the open source ones. The two biggest players in the X11 desktop game are open source, yes, but they're both commercial products created and maintained by people who are paid to do it.
Outside "software for geeks", where are the big players open source products that have "put down" the commercial vendors?
Some people prefer IntelliJ (Java), for example. In the case of Lisp, Java, Smalltalk, Forth and version control there seems to be a tools market.
If you have a vendor that delivers a superior product, why not pay? Isn't that, in the end, like paying for "support" in the FLOSS world? I think so. In fact, vendors will sell you support packages.
I believe there's a sweet spot in there between price and functionality unrivaled by open source tools. Some developers have been able to find it (IntelliJ, for example), others haven't. As with any business, there's a lot of marketing to it. I think UNA's strategy is smart: let the users try the free version and if they like it, and they're not cheapskates, they might upgrade to the collaborative version.
OTOH some vendors charge way too much, that's true (like $ 8000, IIRC, for Smalltalk VisualAge 7: http://www.instantiations.com/VAST/index.html).
Main difference between the BSD license and the GPL license: one is from California and the other is from Massachusetts
This doesn't make sense. There is a reason the Anonymous developer is working the free, unpaid overtime. Anonymous person: bump up your estimates or do something to get that time back. The next time I hear about a programmer whining about their free overtime, I will interrupt their cathartic soliloquy with these two statements:
Work only 40 hours a week. If someone complains, say "Go ahead, fire me. These are not the terms of my employment. If you want me to work more, pay me more."
If you don't have the nerve to say something like that, try this one: "You know, if you're looking to save money on labor, you can always send my job overseas and lay me off. I hear they write really good code over there. And, the ones in China never, ever put back doors in their code."
The ants are laughing at your puny organization scheme.
It should be legal to shoot a socialist on sight. They really are sub-human vermin.
I think you must have slept through the 20th century, dude. Someone tried all that I think, didn't work out so well.
Open Source design - Programmer needs a feature and adds it. Chances are other programmers will need that feature too.
Pay for design - Marketer decides the tool needs Christmas tree lights around the edge. Marketer is not a programmer.
#Develop (Win): http://sharpdevelop.net/OpenSource/SD/
prosecute the free software tool makers for anticompetitive product dumping, mandating a minimum cost for software tools. That will restore some order back into the market for software tools, by effectively eliminating the free tools that illegally undercut the legitimate proprietory tools that have a reasonable cost per copy. A reasonable cost per toolset could be based on Microsoft's Visual Studio Team Edition.
...if it's one thing every open source developer has an itch to scratch about, it's development environments. Even if they didn't plan to, but trying to fix another application they go "well fixing the application goes well, but these tools could use some tweaks" it'll happen. If I feared open source, it's the last area I'd want to compete in.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Please address the tyranny of the majority problem.
First, I'm not sure I'm understanding your terminology. Communism (as an economic term) refers to pooled labor and resources within a cell. This cell size can be anything from the atomic family unit, in very minimalist communism, to an entire state, in extreme communism. It sounds to me that what you're describing sounds more like 'socialism' (the economic term) which is resources and labor shared by the entire economy.
I don't think extreme communism or extreme socialism is a viable or sustainable economic model. The problem with your utopian vision is that in order to have everyone working together, there has to be government control over that labor and resources. Even in a pure democracy, this easily leads to a tyranny of the majority, where the masses select subsets of society to do more or less appealing work. Such centralized control almost always devolves into a totalitarian regime, simply because already being centralized it is easier for a totalitarian regime to take over, and lacking the power of money, there are fewer with enough consolidated power to stop it.
You talk about representative power being transferred, but that consolidated power can begin creating its own misinformation and controls. People aren't all brilliant or interested in being informed. A lot are willing to abdicate responsibility to their priest and the resulting decisions are something the rest of us still have to live with. In the US, if we were a strict democracy, blacks would still be slaves, women would not be able to vote, and homosexuality would be illegal... because in each of these cases the majority of the people (as defined at the time) were opposed to allowing minorities to have rights.
Now I've spent time thinking about models for utopian societies and seeing where past attempts have succeeded and failed. I think the real key to a sustainable and ideal economy is moderation. Keep capitalism, socialism, and communism all balanced and directed as they are most effective. I'm all for a a more direct democracy, but not a simple, majority rules one. Rather, think the most sustainable society is one where the socialism is directed to provide for necessitates and to prevent capitalism from resulting in consolidation. That should, in fact, be a primary goal of the government, to prevent wealth from consolidating, especially in ways that are not based solely upon merit (inheritance). I think money is a very useful tool in our society, just not one that should be applied to basic necessities or rights.
A lot of our society's great advances were motivated by self interest and greed and as a society we should exploit that resource. If a woman invents a way to provide cheap power without pollution, well she deserves to be living in luxury the rest of her life. That does not imply that said person's children should not have to work to get luxuries. It does not imply that if a person is average or below average and never comes up with any sort of great idea that they should have to work a thousand times as hard and be constantly stressed as they just try to find enough money to keep their family fed and indoors.
What I find really interesting is that my very moderate position, describing what has really worked to provide the best standards of living elsewhere, is considered radical in the US.
I'm not so sure. Based on how the debate is frequently framed here in Canada, what many people are concerned about is equal care (or equal access to care) as opposed to a basic level of care with the opportunity to purchase different (better?) treatments out of the patient's pocket.
Link?
Does this case apply only to IDE tools? What other software tools are losing market from FOSS? Why not OS, graphics, music, and office s/w?
Perhaps as the 'Tool for Building Other Tools', IDE by nature matures and evolves fastest and got to a point where when you can *try* a hundred different ones for free nobody bothers to build a really good one anymore. Or, as the most personal gear a dev must live by, conditioning works too well to stem innovation once patterns set in. The Eclipse vs. NetBeans camps bears this out, and you'll usually have to pry Visual Studio or Dreamweaver from the dead, cold hands of devs that earn mortgages by them. They would rather *pay* for those IDEs than anything FOSS has to offer.
This is central to the MS dominance and FOSS struggle as native apps. Why do you think XCode is free? If a group with similar dedication as the Linux or Mozilla movement would create a Windows IDE that is better than VS, while including environments to build also *nix apps and next gen web apps IN Windows, perhaps Redmond will slowly loose its grip on the PC. But as long as millions of people keep using VS to keep building Windoze-only apps, Windoze will maintain its grip.
Wait, how long have you lived in a capitalist economy? I enjoy living where I do, but I assure you, rational isn't the best way to describe it.
Quack, quack.
The beauty of a free-market is that if the product you feel you need isn't available you can bring it to the marketplace.
And guess what? If it's good enough (i.e. you can show enough value) it might succeed.
However the free-market doesn't entitle anyone to success. So lets stop the FOSS bashing and move on.
Quack, quack.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
In your scenario, your management is the problem.
They can't do simple math. Unless you make less than $200 a week, that is. Then their decision would be acceptable because then they'd have a net savings.
Otherwise they are obstacle in your story, not FOSS.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
No, it's just killing the commercial market for developer tools.
Many of the Open Source tools are also commercial, and will remain that way for the foreseeable future. Proprietary tools are dying.
At this rate, software programming profession will dwindle in the west, and all the maintenance jobs will move to the cheaper countries.
"According to De Goes, selling a source-code editor, even a very good one, is all but impossible in the post-open source era"
Umm, very good as judged by who?
Obviously he OSS people don't judge it to be enough "better" than free alternatives to justify its price.
If you come out with a tool which is "better enough" to justify its price then I will buy it.
I'm one of those guys who HATES Msoft... but if they came out with a version of VC++ ported to linux and with the windows specific junk torn out I would buy it. I'd pay hundreds of dollars for it! (It's one of the few things they have done which I actually consider to be very good)
But making an IDE/Editor which is $150 better than emacs is pretty damn hard.
Zelda?
Start with Google. This leads to "Philosophy of copyright" on Wikipedia. I'm at work so I can't take time out to dig up the exact essays that I read, but these should get you started.
You're right to have digital supply/demand questions. IMHO, it is different. As in "a whole new category".
Unfortunately, under our current laws, we keep trying to treat them like physical goods, which doesn't work for some of the same reasons you laid out. You see, in a better capital market (ie: less regulation, less laws to muck things up)....music would be priced according to it's value. And in the world where you can copy with the click of a button, it's much much less than what you have paid all your life.
Certainly not free. But definitely not what the owners and producers think they are entitled to (and are going to Congress to try to enforce). Somewhere in the middle. In fact, it's being played out as we speak. We'll eventually see what the "market will bear" for digital assets. My guess is: not nearly as much as we used to pay for the physical items.
First, it was the commercial market that didn't have the time of day for Linux and open source. So, what did we do... We created our own.
Second, If the open source tools are good enough for the job why should I pay for yours and not donate/contribute to the open source one.
Third, how many people buy Visual Studio? Don't blame the open source community for a slightly better or equivalent than/to FOSS application.
Fourth, nothing like getting slashdotted to get some free marketing.
Everyone, from the top to the bottom, does their time in the industries that create our food, our shelter, our power, etc.
You grossly underestimate human behavior. You're replying to my question of alternatives with a system that is already proved broken? Communism doesn't work.
Any other ideas?
Actually, in the case of editors, he may have a point, but in the case of IDEs it's not Free Software that killed developer tools, it's MSVisualStudio. They take most of the money from people who have money to throw around. And if you don't have money to throw around, you aren't going to pay for something that's only (perhaps) marginally better than the FOSS version. (I've frequently found that tools that I paid for were dramatically WORSE than the FOSS tools. It's hard to give most software a reasonable test before purchasing it.)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
The best C++ editor out there for Linux, which he actually mentions in his article, is *Slickedit* which is commercial and actually quite expensive. I've used it, and it is worth every dollar.
What about Textmate? Visual Studios? Araxis Merge? Fog Bugz?
If anything the market for development tools has massively expanded. It's true, closed source developers have to work hard to stay ahead of the open source curve, but plenty of companies have succeeded at this.
Frankly, the spit and polish benefit of software developed by a company with UI experts, QA people, and all the other roles that are usually absent in open source teams tend to create more usable software, and even developers care about usability in their tools. The idea that most developers don't mind piece of crap UI's is a myth.
That's not to say there aren't good open source tools. Obviously, GCC is good, and there are numerous open source editors. However, having used both sets of tools extensively, I can assure you that the open source dev tools world still lags behind significantly.
This shows small thinking.
You should make your toolchain so that developers can use the editor they are comfortable with. Then you get happy coders and maximized productivity.
The people who declare you must us a certain office suite, and a few months later, when the money is scarce, and jobs are being cut, often look pretty worried.
I don't see the death of Dreamweaver any time soon.
So why is this Open Source's fault? developers just get attached to their editors/IDEs and don't like to change. The same thing would happen if it the IDE was a proprietary product. Visual Studio's fans are going to use Visual Studio if at all possible, Eclipse fans are going to use Eclipse. Eclipse being free is not the issue, it's always difficult to displace an existing product
It's like those prima donna physicians who are always telling the hospital administrators how to do "surgery" and how to prescribe "medicine". They're just spoiled and waste money!
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Let me explain by example. The article talks about UNA, a collaborative editor.
To me UNA's core feature is that you can have the same project and even the same file open between multiple people, and you immediately see each other's changes. I see the HMI part of UNA (an the editor you can work without having to use your mouse) as "frills".
The opening post quite rightly states that it's extremely hard to get people to change editors ... they're too used to them and any change there is a hard sell.
But a tool to share a project in real-time is something else I'd say. I wonder if there would have been a viable market for UNA if it just limited itself to keep files synchronised (in real-time) between collaborating programmers but allowed third-party editors access to the files and forced them to reflect edits from other people. You'd need a hook in your editor to have it accept changes from others on the fly, but that's all.
You might then offer your own special UNA editor with full support for this sort of thing but that would be "frills".
Of course I understand that anyone not in a paying project will have a hard time ponying up the money for commercial tools (like e.g. Rational Rose, Purify, Intel's performance tuning compilers etc.). When confronted with a choice between spending thousands of dollars on tools, or using whatever is available as Open Source I'll generally work under Linux and use Open Source tools like Valgrind. In that situation I don't really care so much about free as in speech, but I do care about free as in beer.
But still ... I think that there would be interest in systems that allow file-sharing, provided they allow people to use their own familiar editors.
Such a world you describe is utopian. It does not seem to guard against assholes. It would not take many to corrupt such a system. It would in fact be extremely surprising if the system did not self-corrupt in the space of a few years.
I really should give PFE another chance. I was made to use it during the first few months of my undergraduate degree, and developed what is probably a wholly undeserved dislike for it.
I can't even remember why I didn't like it, it was probably more to do with the lecturers insistence than anything else.
I've since made a point of only forcing my opinion on my final year project students. Its only fair...
A learning experience is one of those things that say, 'You know that thing you just did? Don't do that.' - D. Adams
"Some developers would rather quit their job than be forced to use a new editor or IDE."
Yeah, I knew a few like this. They all used some proprietary obscure programming editor, swore it was the best thing since sliced bread and refused to use anything as silly as comments since anyone who couldn't read C should never be working on their code anyway.
Elitism at its finest! And this is exactly the thing that differentiates most proprietary editors and IDEs; "look, you can't do this with X, Y or Z" (a direct result of telling the developers to "put something in that X, Y and Z can't do!") never mind whether it is really useful or not. And efficiency? Hah! As long as you only want to do what the proprietary vendor has envisioned that you want to do (and the obvious expected thing is exactly what I would hire a "good" developer to do) then it will speed things up; anything out of the ordinary will cause hours and hours of pain trying to get around the IDE "helping" you.
Look, programming editors and IDEs are tools to an end, NOT the end in themselves. It has gotten to the point where I do not use any of the more sophisticated features in any new IDE I pick up because not every IDE has it. When I have to learn another IDE (or just switch projects to one that used another IDE) the last thing I want to do is unlearn habits. Unlearning special features costs me more time than those special features could ever save.
Now add to this the fact that I have to pay (and pay for each new round of bug fixes, errr, version), that the basic user interface is different from every other product out there (and jealously protected by IP so that no other user interface will ever be like it) and it becomes real obvious what makes Free software alternatives attractive.
So cry me a river, developers of proprietary editors and IDEs. What killed your products was not free software; instead it is the same rampant featuritis and protective "nobody but me" attitude that brought us such stellar products as Windows Vista.
What?
The *copyright* exists "to promote the progress of science and useful arts". That is, so that the owner of the copyright can make money on their invention. It's giving an incentive to create new things.
I'll add a anecdotal. As an engineer in an ISV shop which does primarily Windows development, we have considered adding Linux-specific products to our product line, and come to basically the same conclusions (without spending all the money to develop them first). Basically, unless you can build something with very compelling and durable advantages against FOSS alternatives, you're wasting time and money (in the commercial business sense).
/. community, and that is fine... but I hope this sheds some insight into why there will continue to be many more ISV's building software for Windows than for Linux, no matter how mainstream and compelling Linux becomes.
It's hard to build something which is very compelling without substantial investment, so there's no process for "do a first pass, then iterate" which makes business sense. Second, the only way to gain durable advantage against FOSS is patents, and they may not be applicable, take substantial time/money investment, and might be unreliable. In short, it's a very tenuous business proposition to try to make a small-scale ISV commercial product for Linux.
Thus, we don't make any products for Linux, and are unlikely to do so in the future. I'm sure this will be met with a resounding "who cares" from the
1. give away free software under the GPL
2. build a user community
3. gets lots of worthwhile contributions
4. change software license on next version
5. Profit!
Does this really mean anything? I wouldn't bother *downloading* the commercial tools they speak of (let alone installing) even if they were free (and open source). Perhaps better headline would be "Open source killing marginally useful commercial developer tools"
Their crappy site also crashes Konqueror 3.5.9.
The guy being interviewed was merely stating the fact that once they took the neat networked collaboration features out of their editor to create the stripped-down personal edition for offline use, there was no longer anything in it that was innovative enough to get people to pay for. All in all, he seemed quite resigned to the prospect of competing with free - providing the personal edition at no cost so people could try out the UI, and then charging for the collaboration features in the advanced version.
ShielfW0lf and Chief Camel Breeder go to blows?
Actually, I agree with BOTH of you.
I like FOSS because it enables me to do things I cannot do as a non-programmer. I'm not interested in programming. I want to PRODUCE. But, at the prices of SOME non-FOSS apps, I'll never legally/morally/$-wise obtain many nice applications through which to further my activities.
OTOH, I also feel that FOSS must *simply work*. I am yet flabbergasted again at OpenOffice.org and their definition of "Sections".
After failing to get Kpackage to install the RPMs, I had to use the rpm -i --nodeps for EACH of the some 15 rpms. After getting OO.o up and running the first thing I checked was Base. I felt kicked in the chest. A weak, ms-abscess clone. Sure, "E" for effort, but not even a "C". If OO.o are going to CLONE a database ostensibly aimed at non-programmers, they should clone Lotus Approach and some of FileMaker. Otherwise, they just continue to so infuriate me that I will likely create a step-by-step tutorial of how to create a screenplay/dialog tracking database from scratch using a simpler tho outdated database front-end created around 1992, and still unbeatable by OO.o in 2008..." Lotus Approach not only has TEMPLATES, it has APPLICATIONS ready to run, and they also can be reverse-engineered and customized.
I fired up Write/r, and again, felt kicked. Word Pro, also in Lotus Smartsuite (as is Approach) STILL hands-down (for me, at least) has a more sane approach to dealing with compound documents. If I take 5 or 10 disparate documents with individual layouts, fonts, and so on, and bind them as one document and want to preserve each one's attributes in Word Pro, I create a master document, and then activate the spreadsheet-like tabs and import each document as a section or as a division. I can jump to each using the tabs. Each retains it's page orientation. No lame "rule" line that doesn't delineate the document's internal parts. Word Pro has multiple formatted previews, too.
I will reclaim some 200 MB tonight and allocate it to screen shots, footage, and documentation. Maybe I should have done it in 1999 or 2002 instead of giving up and waiting to see if they'd "get it"....
Lotus SmartSuite is why I am running windoze in VirtualBox (it used to be Win4Lin, but i grew weary of kernel incompatibilities and feeling forced by Win4Lin to upgrade past win 98. But getting a new laptop forced me (pretty much) to take vista in all its RAM-hogging glory. Now, if only I could swap vista out for XP (i bought this l/t in Dec 07, and don't know anyone willing to swap OS's with me...)
But, I seriously doubt OO.o as FOSS apps goes will seriously dent ms orifice until OO.o seriously incorporates the best aspects of Lotus SmartSuite into OO.o instead of wasting time and money and pretending to independently develop without stepping on LSS/Lotus/IBM patents. Tools invented TODAY can make child's play out of what was "novel" and "difficult to attain" back in 1992, so legally, technically, and morally, I'd say SmartSuite is probably 90% "clonable" in a handful of FOSS apps like KDevelop, and wxwidgets and Qt/Trolltech tools.
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
That depends on what your definition of "efficiency" is.
Capitalism's main positive feature is that it is performs parallelized search function in the space of "technological progress" while avoiding local minimas. But it does so at the price of a tremendous waste of resources. Or have you not heard of the mountains of plastic bags, discarded packaging and other discarded plastic junk clogging city dumps and pretty much covering the middle of the Atlantic? Some "efficiency".
That of course depends on what your acceptable parameters for such a system are. If we are to talk science fiction for example, theoretically a shared-consciousness hive capable of dynamically moderating the mental independence of its members might do the trick: unified consciousness removes the problem of tyranny/governance/dissent while maximizing allocation of resources to specific selected tasks, the moderated independence allows for the parallel search function, etc and so on.
But of course such a system has little to do with our present concept of "pursuit of happiness" and a whole gamut of other issues well outside of economic theory. I bring it up to illustrate that focusing on "maximum efficiency" (of whatever aspect of the system) by itself can have somewhat unexpected consequences.
Let's look at the person complaining - he tries to sell an editor, right? Well, am I better off learning to use and customize emacs (or even Vim) or learning whatever little fey keystrokes he thinks is right for programming? You know the answer as well as I do.
Quit whining. Nobody ever got rich making software tools (except Microsoft, but that's because they bundled).
That is all.
Anyway, as a developer looking for dev tools, why do I care what a company's website looks like? I just want to view and test the product.
There is a distinction to be made between capitalist economics and free market. While free market allows for optimal allocation of resources, control of companies by capital (stockholders) is a thinly disguised new age slavery. Solution is simple - take a look at banks vs credit unions. Let people who work at companies govern companies, for example, let them have seats on the board through inter-company elections. After all, that is what US did and stopped being property of the King.
Tell VxWorks, Microware, or Green Hills Software that their tools are dead.
They'll laugh you to the door, waving their massive government and aviation contracts as so many hand-fans, to keep you cool as you explode with envy.
RTOS systems and toolchains that are rock-solid are hard to create and to continually release STABLE software for.
Open-source's penchant for acting like a bunch of typewriting monkeys, doesn't bode well for its use in mission-critical (usually involving human life) systems that must be audited... and never will.
Great end-user software, but you don't want anything but a commercial RTOS moving the rudder, ailerons, elevator and controlling the FADEC that's got 100% control of the engines.
RTOS FTW!
+++OK ATH
Anything that is -necessary- ?
Has anyone succeeded in defining necessity independent of a desirability model?
AFAICS, this is a problem not very easily workable through language and/or rationality.
Do we REALLY know what is necessary, or the TRUE cost (for example http://aalhadsaraf.blogspot.com/2008/05/story-of-one-rupee-coin-true-cost-and.html )of anything?
What?
The *copyright* exists "to promote the progress of science and useful arts". That is, so that the owner of the copyright can make money on their invention. It's giving an incentive to create new things.
The Constitution says nothing about making money, it simply states that Congress may grant limited protection as a tool to advance science and art. If it can be proven that science and art can progress without protection then there would be no need for Congress to use the tool.
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
Hi! Can you explain a little bit more what would you expect from Zend Studio debugger configuration comparing it to PDT debugger configuration? Thanks!
I really don't understand why people assume open source software as free? You pay for everything. Difference is only pay directly or indirectly. One way is directly: I'll give you the money, you'll give me this product. Another way is indirectly: I'll pay big taxes and students will have big enough scholarship to spend their time working on some student open source project. Or I'll buy hardware and company spend some amount of revenue for some open source projects. Or companies build commercial products based on OS projects and spend some revenue on OS projects, to improve their products.
How would you act to corrupt such a system?
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
*That* is bullshit.
... they have nothing to fear from OSS. Nothing whatsoever.
People without capital are able to produce because of the nature of computers, and because - thanks to capitalism - computers are cheap. That is why open source can exist. Not the other way around. Without cheap computers OSS would still be an MIT circle-jerk.
But you still can't develop complex software without capital. The organizations that produce complex open-source software are funded by capitalist economics because it makes sense for those capitalists to invest in them. There are still thousands of examples of pieces of software that no doubt "should" exist in the OSS world, but don't, because the problems they have to overcome are not solved in undergraduate textbooks. OSS software is the trailing edge of computer software technology, not the leading edge. The leading edge still requires investment and capital and all the other necessary evils.
OSS software is destroying commercial software *on the trailing edge*. This much is obvious. That this would happen has been obvious for at least a decade. You have to wonder about the people who started up companies in this century to sell text editors. But those who started up companies to solve hard industrial problems
Good luck with the Marxism.
bad taste, sorry.
- collaborations tools
- user friendly design
#2 is usually a big plus but never a deal maker, we are developers and can handle sophisticated tools, so commercially banking on that doesn't make much sense.#1 well that could be done as part of a commercial plug-in into an existing IDE. Both NetBeans and Eclipse have existing communities of commercial plug-ins while the IDEs provide support for many things that the text editor doesn't . After all I've only needed to collaborate with other... never need anyone else to edit text though.
#3 I believe that #1 already exists for NetBeans.
Your CPU is not doing anything else, at least do something.
The prevalence of such readily available IDEs today is only something that I could dream about years ago. I am an old guy in terms of this. Our family got their first PC relatively late in the "PC Game". But even then, the only languages that were available were BASIC and PASCAL (and PASCAL was pirated). No one had heard of such a thing as C or FORTRAN. I wanted to create "cool" computer apps like similar applications you could for DOS (forget Apple, let's start small at that time). Yet, no one I knew could steer me in the right direction to do that. Sure, there was PASCAL in my highschool and I took it, but the applications developed were NOT real stand-alone apps-they had to be run in the compiler in the development environment itself. When I went to college, I got a Mac-the worst decision of my young life. I could not do anything technical with it--and there was not a Mac store around to guide me to the tools I needed. In the end, the computer that was to help me in college, to aid me in my studies sat around and collected dust because I did not have the tools needed to use it! It was only two years after I graduated from college that my estranged father told me about Code Warrior--which sold for $500-$1000!!!! What about the PC Market? Borland, Microsoft, all of the IDEs had hefty prices associated with them. I guess what I am trying to say is: free IDEs-good. I wish that would have been available to me when I was in school--it would have enhanced my education and provided me with a better environment of success.