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Open Source Killing Commercial Developer Tools

Posted by kdawson on from the evolving-ecosystem dept.

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.

3 of 742 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Urg by $RANDOMLUSER · · Score: 4, Informative

    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
  2. IntelliJ IDEA by CountBrass · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.
  3. Re:Visual Studio still seems to be selling by Interfacer · · Score: 4, Informative

    I usually don't reply to AC, but what the hell...

    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 .h extension.
    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.