Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
Learning a new language for a task is one thing. The benefits are obvious. Learning a new editor or IDE is not so obvious. They're simply tools to make your life easier to get a job done. If you already have a hammer you like then why be forced to use another hammer to bang in the same nails?
Not necessarily. They may have asked around and found you were the only one who wanted to use VI, and that everyone else wanted to use Emacs.
Just because someone from management doesn't act upon your preference doesn't mean they didn't listen or value your opinion. They just may not have agreed with it, and given the position they are in they have the right - and mandate - to act accordingly.
If you're going to be a prima-donna and expect a company to bow to a developers wishes, then you are probably not going to be missed.
Not all people in management are PHB types - of course, most aren't. Lots are very clever people who deserve their positions and although you may not agree with them, that doesn't mean that they are wrong.
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!
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?
Not only are we richer, but we are less likely to be put in a situation where fragmentation in the tools-development department causes our projects to be late.
Having worked with at least three major source code repository tools (CVS, ClearCase, and PVCS/Dimensions) I could give an entire rant about how they each give the top-level objects that you checkout different names (Modules, VOBs, and Products).
If you want an honest opinion, I think every developer should know how to work with CVS/Subversion just because of its simplicity and freedom. But I think for huge projects (~50+ developers) I would recommend the added control that ClearCase provides to make it easier for people to work collaboratively.
However, 50 licenses of ClearCase (and by-the-way... you need to buy ClearQuest (to manage problem reports) and MultiSite (to manage distributed development)) costs about half a million dollars. Is that worth it? You could pay 5 or 6 additional developers for that kind of money.
Support the 30 Hour Work Week!!!
Leo, you are as usual over generalizing. People do not pay ridiculous sums for Visual Studio; if all they want is the compiler and editor they download it free. Microsoft has had to adjust to compete, not that they wouldn't have done the same if by some miracle Borland had remained viable; they're doing the same now with MS Hyper-V virtualization software, charging a pittance on top of the cost of Windows Server 2008 to achieve the dual aims of crushing VMWare and staying off the radar of the anti-trust regulators. If people want tools like a profiler and all the extras they still have to buy Visual Studio Team Suite.
What Open Source has done so far is say "here's something that copies commercial efforts and it's almost as good". If you can live with emacs - and not feel sick to the stomach using something written and endorsed by Stallman - then perhaps, ignoring all factors but the purchase price - you might save money. You don't see vendors with successful products (i.e. Visual SlickEdit editor - powerful and platform-independent) whining about OSS authors owning the market.
If you don't have a .emacs file then you kind of missed the point with Emacs.
Why bother though? In the last decade there have been wonderful advances in application user interface design which appear to have passed Emacs by. The days of having to roll your own config files for a text editor are long gone.
I won't deny that it isn't a fantastically capable editor, no doubt being developed by some seriously talented programmers, but I do state that the interface is a big pile of donkey doings.
A learning experience is one of those things that say, 'You know that thing you just did? Don't do that.' - D. Adams
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.
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.
Face it, Emacs users love it. I've never got past the initial learning curve - my poor weak head can't retain the most basic Emacs commands such as save or quit, for long enough to use them next time. I never had that problem with vi. But that's not the point. Emacs users are not using it because they're cheap. They use it because they like it. You don't see vendors with successful products (i.e. Visual SlickEdit editor - powerful and platform-independent) whining about OSS authors owning the market. Without a doubt, they'd do better in the absence of Open Source. The reason they don't whine is that they recognise that there's no reason the playing field should be biased to their advantage.
Notepad++ does enough of what Emacs does to please?
I think not. It only runs on Windows. Ouchy.
Years ago I made the switch from Brief (which was a tremendous programmers editor at the time) to Emacs for one reason: Emacs ran on my windows PC, my linux boxes, and my VAXen, and it looked and worked the same on all platforms. And Emacs will run on OS X, too. I'm still using Emacs today, for the same reason: cross-platform compatability.
(BTW Visual Studio supports "industry standard languages?" Please go back to bed, Mr. Ballmer.)
there are 3 kinds of people:
* those who can count
* those who can't
Just wondering, have tried Eclipse lately? Depending on your needs, you can get a fairly fast and slim Eclipse distro with all your needed plugins. 3.3 is much 'prettier' (streamlined, although it is still slightly ugly. Netbeans wins IMHO for best looking IDE - there's a great plugin for beautiful skins... I think it's for a presentation mode or something, but it's beautiful) than previous Eclipses, and it performs only slightly slower than Netbeans. I haven't used Intelli J, so I can't compare it.
For me, though, the functionality and flexibility of the plugin ecosystem trumps speed and aesthetics. Even if it's slightly slower, I'm faster because across platforms, languages and computers, I've got the same environment. You can zip the folder and carry it around on a USB drive and run it anywhere you have Java (pretty much everywhere these days). At any rate, to each his own.
If you haven't tried Eclipse in the 3.3 version, I'd encourage you to give it another shot if the chance presents itself and you have the time to fiddle with setting it up for your own preferences. I've written Java in vi over ssh, on pspad, scite, Netbeans, JBuilder, and on the back of napkins; it's all about making use of what you have available and having what you prefer when you can.
If I mod you up, it doesn't necessarily mean I agree with what you've said, sorry.
I'm not one of the rabid Free Marketers around here, but your logic is flawed: it does not follow that actors in a free market be omniscient for them to make informed decisions. They only need to have enough information to choose between two different products. There will still be an aggregate effect of doing so.
It is, and I use it 8+ hours a day. It's commercial software, I have paid the full license and I have enjoyed every cent of it. That license is 79 dollars though, which is more reasonable. Heck I'd happily pay for upgrades, but thus far they have been free. That's how you treat customers instead of moaning on slashdot.
Given he said "next time" the implication is it's happened before and he expects it to happen again, but is still there. Management can smell the people who will give them unpaid overtime a mile away. It's $200 saved, and the guy who's chosen to be a slave will remain there.
Except he wouldn't have, he's making up the time lost to the inferior tool in unpaid overtime - so the amount of non-tool using time spend working is the same. Ka-ching, Ka-ching for management.
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
But why are you assuming the commercial tool will gain you $200 at all? My experience is exactly the contrary to yours, open source tools are always better specially in the customization and scripting areas and then there the costs attached to using an opaque, unruly intentionally incompatible closed source system.
I remember setting up apache, mysql, php, aptana and the mysql tools was almost an automated task in windows, whereas installing a ASP development stack of took the whole day, specially since only one guy had access to the sacred product keys.
Improving the quality won't help much, because people prefer cheap vs expensive and high quality. That's why Walmart and McDonalds are so successful.
Slashdotters will close their ears and continue to deny that OSS is not harmful, because they are addicted to the free software crack. All OSS does is wipe out wealth earned by programmers and companies until the nightmare vision of "equality" is materialized -- inferior and superior individuals earn the same salary, have same assets, just like communism.
I used to think vi and ctags were enough, but when my first big Java project crept past 2000 or so lines I decided it was time to learn Eclipse. Since then I've written many tens of thousands lines more, and now Eclipse and its plugins have advanced to the point that I even write Python and C/C++ in Eclipse. It's not like starting with Eclipse ties me to Eclipse forever, but as long as I get more machine assistance with Eclipse, I stay with it.
ctags just can't compare to the incredible level of integration you get in Eclipse. Even NetBeans can't compare. Eclipse has its own compliant Java compiler which it uses directly and iteratively, marking where code is broken before you've even saved the file, let alone done a build. And builds themselves happen extremely quickly and automatically, to the point that it becomes completely practical to just import libraries as projects instead of archives and get a little more flexibility.
Sam ty sig.