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

Re:Offer value

[jimicus]

For example: there's an expensive, commercial ARM compiler despite the existence of GCC. People buy it because it generates code that's ~20% smaller and faster. Generating code that's 20% smaller and faster has real value when more or less all modern ARM development is embedded - so 20% smaller is a real bonus.

Such a benefit is rather less noticeable on a modern PC.

We're talking about Hans Reiser AGAIN?

[SNMPguy]

OK...ok... So the open source community has some interesting characters, but we're not ALL killers.
At least it's only commercial developer tools this time...

http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/04/28/2243232
http://news.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/06/09/1155214