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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.
They're not giving away the editor with the integrated chat. They were "forced" to release the personal edition of their collaborative editor at no charge.
1. Slashvertise crippled version of your program.
2. ???
3. Profit!!
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
- 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.
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.
If you don't have a .emacs file then you kind of missed the point with Emacs.
Of particular benefit is a function like:
(global-set-key [A-f10] 'electric-buffer-list)
which binds a key to a function.
no it's nothing like that. Software only costs you once to develop it. cloth is a continually drain for weavers as they require raw products to make.
Software is unique it doesn't have raw products that make it up so once you have designed it it is free to make unlimited copies.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
I usually don't reply to AC, but what the hell...
.h extension.
I don't know what compiler versions you are talking about.
VC6 was not iso compliant. No wonder. the ISO standard wasn't ratified at that time.
But g++ 2.95 scored equally bad, or worse.
VC++8.x and 9 are very compliant, and on par with g++.
Sure VC++ has compiler extensions, but so does g++, which litters the global namespace with ISO non-conformant functionnames (snprintf).
However, VC++ also has a switch that turns it into ISO mode, allowing not a single compiler extension.
And I don't know if you know, but a lot of headers (string for example) are supposed to come WITHOUT the
string.h is a C include header. string is a C++ include header.
But hey, at least you're a respectable programmer. Me, I use whatever tool I need to get the job done.
Intellisense - an incremental enhancement of Auto Completion, which has been around since at least the early 80's (Before Microsoft Existed!)
.... all their best ideas were invented by other people!
Intellisense itself (with reflection lookup) was based on ideas freely published in 1986 (by researchers NOT working for Microsoft)
Microsoft has never been shy of appropriating other peoples innovation
Puteulanus fenestra mortis
But g++ 2.95 scored equally bad, or worse. I'd love to know how you "scored" them, but VC6 didn't even support partial specialization of templates. As someone who had to port several thousand lines of complex C++ from gcc-2.95 to VC6, this was the single biggest headache I had to deal with. VC7 got closer, but was still missing a bunch of things that even gcc-2.95 had.
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The jModule
So next time my management refuse to buy a $200 tool and I lose a week of working time with an inferior FOSS equivalent that's me saved is it? Even if I have to make up the lost week in unpaid overtime? Good for my soul, maybe.
So, if there were no free tools, and your management had to close up shop and go get jobs working for someone else because the cumulative cost of all these tools was too much for their enterprise to bear, would that make you happier?
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
Then fix it!
I know, I know, you're tired of hearing that, but it's the right answer. If you do not have the skill to fix it, but still retain the inclination, pay someone who IS skilled enough to fix it. The neat part is that it'll work EXACTLY the way you want, and if 'the way you want' is useful enough, it may even become some type of standard (official or non) and then you'd be on the bleeding edge!
Unfortunately, some problems in free software are made unrealistically difficult by the insidious device known as "software patents". These little devils have the ability to cripple free software, being that they can make 'doing it right' illegal. I, however, do not believe that this is a problem with -free- software at all, but just the opposite.
Two groups of people:
1. the corporate sponsors: companies like Red Hat, IBM, Canonical, etc. who sponsor coders to write code. They profit by reselling the hard work FOSS coders contribute.
2. the private contractors: companies you've never heard of who take open source software, use it to build their own codes in-house for analysis (think CFD, CAD, math models, etc.) and then sell the results. They never feed anything back into the ecosystem, they take your hard work, imrpove and use it, and sell derived results.
Both are technically legal, nothing wrong with either, but leave FOSS volunteers without anything in return, monetary or otherwise. They are making money. Why you or anyone else might work in the FOSS ecosystem? That's a personal decision you have to come to terms with. Find your own reason to be.
That's assuming the $5000 car doesn't itself need more than $3000 in repairs over the next six months.
My blog
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 ----
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.
Why would the management invest $200 in saving you a week of overtime when they don't have to pay you for it?
This might be true if he were manufacturing widgets. Or if his bosses were idiots. But software development is both creative work and craftsmanship. The most productive teams I see are happy ones, well supplied with whatever they need to get their work done.
Smart bosses know that the cost of a little extra software or hardware is as nothing compared with the value of increased productivity. If your fully loaded cost per engineer is $100k (high for some areas, low for mine), then you obviously expect to make more than that on them. A minimum of 1.5x, and for Silicon Valley, the number's probably 5x-20x.
In a situation like that, if $200 lets you increase their productivity by 2% (one week a year), then you've made a minimum of 15x on your investment of $200. That's a massive win. There's a reason that companies like Google treat their engineers so well: it pays off.
In my experience (I am a consultant), Management's position on purchasing "non-essential" development tools is the same as it always has been - it was "no" before FOSS, and still "no", now. In fact, those managers also say "no" to the FOSS tools, claiming that the "other costs" of FOSS tools exceed the money not spent.
Most of the developers I have worked with that do use FOSS tools are doing so secretly.
Don't try to out wierd me, three-eyes. I get stranger things than you, free with my breakfast cereal. --Zaphod Beeblebr
No, it simply rewards most those who are most nearly omniscient. This competition is an integral part of the free market.