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.

Comments

Why complain?

[G3ckoG33k]

If you want to complain, use emacs. That will give you a whole set of (other) reasons.

Re:and piracy killed music

[Anonymous Coward]

and gasoline killed steam, and steam killed sail, and sail killed slave rowers... It's more like:

Diesel engines (and electricity on the railways) killed steam, steam killed sail. Slave rowers were killed off by cannon and the fact that a 17th century man-o-war was simply to big and well protected against cannon shot into the waterline for any galley to stand a chance of successfully ramming it.

Yes.. I'm done nitpicking...

Re:and piracy killed music

[alx5000]

Extra, extra! Better, cheaper tools make worse, more expensive ones unsellable! Film at 11.

Also

[AlgorithMan]

Also Home fucking kills prostitution!

and people who'd rather quit their job, than embrace new technology, are no loss IMHO

Re:If you did RTFA, you should be able to solve th

[The Evil Couch]

A riddle:
If Ctrl + O opens a file, what does Caps Lock + Ctrl + O do?

OPENS A FILE.

Re:and piracy killed music

[mongoose(!no)]

...and sail killed slave rowers... Did it impale them or something?

Re:Urg

[QuantumG]

I used Eclipse for about a week when I did Java development. After suffering insanely bad performance, upgrading my video drivers, downgrading them, rebuilding Eclipse from source, etc, I just gave up. Upon hearing this the Net Beans camp in the office decided to recruit me. Net Beans just made my brain sad.

So, for a while I was using Notepad. Then I started using gVim and life was good, but I noticed that I really wasn't pissing off the Java devs enough so I started using Visual Studio to edit my Java - drove 'em mad.

Re:and piracy killed music

[lyonsden]

piece of mind = 2 cents

peace of mind = priceless

Re:and piracy killed music

[Hognoxious]

If your manager decides you can use a cheaper alternative then clearly the commercial tool is not worth the $200 capital investment.

If your manager decides that 2 + 2 = 5 does that make it so?

NOW GET BACK TO WORK!

It's Rampant

[bill_mcgonigle]

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!