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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.
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?