Open Source Killing Commercial Developer Tools 742
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.
In the Open Source World? (Score:2, Insightful)
Visual Studio still seems to be selling (Score:4, Insightful)
Don't let the door hit you on the way out... (Score:5, Insightful)
If it is like their website (Score:2, Insightful)
Urg (Score:3, Insightful)
No-one wants your editor with an integrated chat program.
WAH.
In the meantime... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:In the Open Source World? (Score:4, Insightful)
1. Give away software 2. ??? 3. Profit!
Suggestions for step 2 - Charge for education, tailoring for specific customers, continued development.
Perhaps not as many can make a living from it, but not much use complaining, it's like being angry at trees for driving profitable oxygen-factories out of business.
Oh really? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Don't let the door hit you on the way out... (Score:5, Insightful)
It's a myth that coders are precious flowers that have to be pampered to be productive.
Re:Visual Studio still seems to be selling (Score:3, Insightful)
TFS is not cheap, no really it's not, and yet it sells very well.
Sorry, N-BRAIN, but your website looks like sh*t. (Score:5, Insightful)
How about wasting 5 minutes on a concept for an online presence and an online marketing strategy? And, please, *do* get a *professional* webdesigner to rebuild the site. You'll find plenty of them here [csszengarden.com].
To be honest, somebody who needs to get a job done nearly cares squat wether a tool is free or costs 300$. It's only because the 300$ tools are just as crappy as the free ones (sic!) that they settle for the free ones. And damn the few bucks I have to shell out for it.
Best example: Zend Studio and PHP Eclipse or PDT Eclipse. If I have to go through the same fuss configging local remote debuggin in either, I see no point in spending 300$ for Zend Studio. That way I'll even learn to configure an open source tool - a skill not wasted - rather than learning to deal with some quirks of some prorprietary tool.
Counterexample: Mint [haveamint.com] is a web presence statistics tool with PHP backend logic. There are like a quarter bazillion of these in Free, FOSS and public domain scatterd all over the web. However, looking at this guys site (he happens to be a good designer *and* a good programmer) I haven't the slightest doubt that his statistics tool will deliver without hassle. Thus whenever I need a statistics tool, he'll be the first and last where I look for it.
It's just a PR stunt (Score:1, Insightful)
If a tool is very good, people will pay for it. OSS is, for the most part, "good enough", so if your tool is just "okay", it can't compete.
OSS is just killing the "me too" market for mediocre software.
Re:Why complain? (Score:4, Insightful)
Actually I find that I use Notepad++ these days, it does enough of what Emacs does to please, but does it in a simpler fashion, I don't have to remember 5^10*24 keypress combinations.
Aside from that, I'd have thought it was Visual Studio that's killing the market myself, it has free versions, has the industry standard languages, and always implements the most recent windows technology.
Offer value (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
The answer is simple - They're charging to much. (Score:5, Insightful)
Even in a small company with 2 developers/engineers, this can often mean that they need 8 licenses.
1 for each developer/engineer for their primary machine = 2 licenses
1 for each developer/engineer for their home machine = 2 licenses
1 for each developer/engineer for their notebook = 2 licenses
1 for each test lab machine = 2 licenses
In total, we are now looking at 8 licenses for 2 blokes, when in reality only one of them will ever be using it at a time anyway.
Then they put a myriad of protection and security in there which makes it a pain to install, maintain, or move.
Then we need a yearly maintenance fee for each license to get bug fixes. With 8 licenses, we need 8 maintenance fees. Even at $100 per license for maintenance, we're now looking at $800- every year just to get bugs fixed!
Assume the Editor costs $250 per license and $100 per year for maintenance (bug fixes), which is about what they charge, with 2 developers/engineers we are now looking at $2,000 for the initial licenses and and additional $800 every year if we want to keep using it or heaven forbid we actually expect it to work. If course, they claim that we get "features" with the maintenance, but most of the time we don't want "features", we just want the product to keep working. Yeah, I know, they'll add support for Windows-Vista or another feature which is neat, but instead of looking at that work as a way of expanding their market, they tend to look at it as a way of lockin or bleeding their existing customer base. This is at the very core of what is wrong with software and the mindset that programmers of software development tools end up with.
Here's a tip for you guy's who do make good tools.
WE WANT TO BUY THEM.
- price them reasonably
- license them reasonably
WE WANT YOU TO STAY IN BUSINESS.
- we will tell all of our friends
- we will tell all of our associates
- we will tell the next generation
- features and fixes generate new customers
WE NEED TO MAKE A LIVING TOO.
- we can't bleed our customers
- we need to write a new program every month or two
- slash the price you charge me to fix your problems
- we can't afford the prices you guys are asking/expecting
Look at the prices for Micro$haft compilers and tools. They quickly run into the thousands of dollars. Borland has also lost the plot and charge an obscene amount of money for their products. Very few of us have customers with unlimited budgets. Very few of us actually want to cheat and buy "Accademic" versions. We are programmers and developers too. We know that it takes you time and you need to eat, but fair is fair, you guys are providing spanners. If you make a good one, you can sell thousands of them, but don't try to retire just because you've made one spanner. The world doesn't work that way anymore.
A Complete Load of Fetid Rabbit Droppings (Score:5, Insightful)
What Open Source has essentially done is say, "You must be at least this tall to publish a tools suite." Pretty much the only compilers that died were the bad ones. No one, for example, laments the passing of Whitesmiths.
As for editors, well, it was pretty obvious 20 years ago that the editor that was powerful and platform-independent (so you didn't have to re-learn everything and re-write all your macros on a new platform) was going to win. That pretty much meant either EMACS or VI.
Schwab
So what's the problem? (Score:4, Insightful)
Just not YOUR tools (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Don't let the door hit you on the way out... (Score:3, Insightful)
Is there any value to the company in standardizing on a text editor? IDEs could probably be argued, as they save project files etc in formats that are incompatible with anything else so mixing environments leads to a lot of duplication of effort keeping project files in sync, but between Emacs and vi (and proprietary editors like the TFA's subject), I strongly suspect you'd get better productivity from your developers by letting them use whatever they're familiar with. In that case, what is someone from management doing mandating which text editors developers use anyway? Maybe the company wouldn't miss such a "prima donna", but I expect the feeling would be mutual, as good developers like to work in companies where the management is as good at making decisions about the company's bottom line as the developer is at coding.
Not buying it. (Score:4, Insightful)
If an OSS tool has been developed that is better than yours its because yours sucked in the first place, a straight clone of a proprietary product won't get anywhere, there has to be plenty of room to improve and the improvement has to be worth the effort.
Re:and piracy killed music (Score:5, Insightful)
Doubtless. But inferior, cost-free tools sometimes make better, commercial ones unsellable. That is the tragedy.
Re:and piracy killed music (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Why complain? (Score:5, Insightful)
Bah. What good is an editor that doesn't include email, usenet, telnet and ftp functions?
Seriously, though, I don't doubt your sincerity, but whenever I read something along the lines of "It works great!", I wonder why it is the endorsement never includes its limitations, or what should be a requisite qualifier of "It works, but only for the limited manner in which I need it to work."
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
It's not that people won't pay for software (Score:3, Insightful)
... it's that people won't pay for bad software.
Time was that you could get away with selling crapware because all the alternatives cost money, so it was harder for people to check them out. FOSS alternatives can be checked out for free, so when people hit a speed bump with your product they're likely to just go check them out. And if they're at least as good as what you're selling, people are liable to stay with them.
The lesson? If you want to make money selling software, evaluate the FOSS alternatives just like you would evaluate a competitor, and be sure that there is something about what you're selling that makes it better than what other people are giving away.
Re:and piracy killed music (Score:4, Insightful)
the tools market died a long time ago (Score:3, Insightful)
Connection failed! (Score:1, Insightful)
0: Connection failed to the host localhost.
Some tools are worth the money, some not (Score:2, Insightful)
Some tools are good, some have bugs that will never be fixed, due to vendor lock-in/market share. If open source tools put pressure on these vendors, I'm all for it. Some (not all) vendors are cruising along, continuing to sell tools they acquired when they bought a smaller company, with no intentions of upgrading them. I suspect they may not even have developers who know enough about the tools to really fix anything.
So, vendors; give us good tools worth paying for, and we'll pay you for them. The free ride is over, community-developed tools will eat your lunch, because they do what users want. No surprise there.
Re:Visual Studio still seems to be selling (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Offer value (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:In the meantime... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:and piracy killed music (Score:5, Insightful)
The reason open source has taken off so much is because it allows people who have no capital to dodge around the wage-slave line and produce things with their own tools.
Teach a man to fish and all that jazz...
Capitalism and all its fictional scarcity have been destroying productivity in the name of control for a long time. The liberty that lies beneath free software and open publishing is increasing productivity, not damaging it.
Capitalist economics is a big shell game, meant to fleece suckers. It's monopoly, dependence, exploitation and theft, pure and simple.
Re:and piracy killed music (Score:5, Insightful)
Well then their competitors will beat them by using the superior tool and shipping a product faster, better, cheaper. That IS free-market economics. Not every company is going to make the best decisions. The best teams will survive, the weakest will fail.
It seems to me these guys selling the source-code editor are not doing their job of marketing/advertising well enough. If their product will truly save time/money then they need to do a better job of convincing people of that. If their tool would save me hours daily I might be interested. But I've never heard of their tool. I've never seen it. That's not MY failure, it's theirs.
Re:The answer is simple - They're charging to much (Score:3, Insightful)
Often, they think they have something special to sell - after all, they wrote - so they can charge like it's gold. I think that many of the tool vendors spend so much energy on their own products... often focusing narrowly on their clever feature Y... that they really forget there's a ton of competitive alternatives out there. In many instances it would make more sense to try to sell an Eclipse plugin that does clever feature Y and call it done (yes, I'm looking at you, embedded-C toolchain developers).
You see this in many small markets, indeed, even in small countries where company X thinks they have a monopoly of sorts, the price goes up, the service goes down, and customers start looking elsewhere. In hard-goods, that elsewhere became parallel and direct imports, while in this software scenario, we're looking at importing open source into our shops instead. Folks who don't know any better may still buy off-the-shelf, but those of us who need to be competitive to earn our own money will find the better options... be they compilers, office suites, or whatever.
Re:and piracy killed music (Score:5, Insightful)
I think we're both generalizing and 'if'-fing a little too much. Every case should be examined separately. We can safely assume Qcad is not a real replacement for AutoCAD, whereas OOo will be more than enough for the majority of MSOffice users. The problem with companies such as the one TFA mentions is that they seem to be trying to sell the same thing you can get somewhere else for free, without any noticeable quality difference, and then bitching about it and crying "the communists are destroying my business!". Ask ice-sellers what they think of the price drop in refrigerators.
If that were true, most places where employees only use email, web browsing and office software would be installing Linux instead of the almost ubiquitous Windows.
Re:This is a clear warning *not* to become a SW en (Score:3, Insightful)
What about IDea? (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:and piracy killed music (Score:1, Insightful)
But inferior, cost-free tools sometimes make better, commercial ones unsellable. That is the tragedy.
Re:and piracy killed music (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Don't get me wrong, I like FOSS software, but I do need it to work. It's for using, not for looking at. If I need a tool and the FOSS versions are inadequate, then I need the commercial version, at least until the FOSS world catches up.
Bad free tools don't increase my productivity compared to good, paid-for tools. They might increase a society's productivity, and I think that's what your rant was really about. But that doesn't help me as an individual. I'm happy that people who can't pay for tools get cost-free ones, but that shouldn't stop my organization buying better tools when appropriate.
PS: informed, rational decisions are an assumption in free-market economics. The fact that you don't like capitalism doesn't make this untrue, as you seem to imply.
Yet another great summary ! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Why complain? (Score:4, Insightful)
- It is not cross platform.
- It can't be compiled using open source compilers (e.g. mingw), not even on Windows.
- Obvious bugs are often rejected without a reason. I have no problem if a bug is rejected for a good reason. I won't even mind if the developer says, "you fix it". But just closing several bugs without a reason is just mean.
Should the first two be fixed, I would take part of it's development also. Should the 3rd one be fixed, I would try try push it as a default editor in my company.
Re:and piracy killed music (Score:3, Insightful)
Not to mention the fact that free software projects are quite often unmanaged, they lack clear vision and most of them are following/copying existing commercial tools/projects, or at the very least they are based on them.
Re:and piracy killed music (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:and piracy killed music (Score:3, Insightful)
1. Write article almost-trolling OSS, make sure to mention your product a bunch.
2. Get article posted to slashdot
3. ??????
4. Profit!!
Re:Don't let the door hit you on the way out... (Score:3, Insightful)
Standardization appears to have intrinsic value to some people.
We have someone high up in our organization who made an attempt to standardize the timeouts on screensavers for all corporate systems. So, you know, everyone would be the same. Currently, there's an on-going effort to standardize workstation hostnames to include information like workstation type (laptop, desktop, etc) building name, floor number, and user name. For a cross-country organization. Which supposedly has an Active Directory service.
Standardizing something may not make sense, but it doesn't mean someone won't try.
c.
Re:Why complain? (Score:5, Insightful)
It's a case study in excellent design of an all-keyboard program. People who dislike it, like you, often testify that you can get a mediocre version of emacs with the default set up of some other IDE. You can.
Re:and piracy killed music (Score:2, Insightful)
The being said, I've not heard of this one either. The reason is simple enough to me. I've never felt that what I use is inadequate. I spend much more time thinking about what to write and how to write it than actually writing it, and my speed in writing it is more or less limited by how quickly I can type. Were I to feel my editor was getting in my way and slowing me down then I would look for a better one.
Which is why the free market is a fairy tale (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:and piracy killed music (Score:5, Insightful)
A lot of capitalistic theory deals with the reality of scarcity. When you reduce costs to zero, you eventually get to the point where you realize time is scarce. Now time is sometimes hard to reduce to a simple and abstract currency, and opportunity costs complicate things, but scarcity exists.
BTW distributing free software does cost money. It is cheap, cheap enough for entities like sourceforge to absorb, but servers require electricity, which in tern require nuclear rectors or fossil fuel to make.
Now open source does lower the cost of entry for building and using software, along with other benefits, but it does so because of capitalism, not in spite of it.
Re:and piracy killed music (Score:5, Insightful)
They shouldn't, and they shouldn't make the opposite assumption either. All tools should be evaluated on their merits. My point was that if a commercial tool is sufficiently better, in context, than its FOSS competition, then it should be bought and used.
Really? Or is that just rhetoric? Maybe a commercial product could come out better because: it gets more hours of input from an appropriate number of good developers; it gets better QA; its documentation is written by skilled technical authors rather than unskilled coders. Not in all cases, but it's possible.
Just because the GPL allows many top developers to work on a FOSS project it doesn't follow that they will.
Manifestly false.
Software tools dubious business anyway (Score:3, Insightful)
The issue is the investment in using the tools. There is always a learning curve with a new tool. The 3rd party tools typically have crap for documentation and few examples. They almost never out perform the readily available alternatives.
For things like editors, that is a personal choice for many developers. The tools you are used to often make you more productive than new tools with features. I have found it is best to be a minimalist as you can't always have your editor of choice everywhere you work, but vi runs everywhere.
I remember the problems setting up "brief" on every machine years back. After having to do it for several years, I just got sick of spending the time. The vi editor is in every UNIX system and can run on Windows as well.
For things like debuggers, there are some pretty cool features, but I can still get the job done just as fast with printf and gdb.
for things like libraries, that market is dead. In fact, except for a few rare examples, there has never really been a big market. Also, libraries have a double hit in that there is the inevitable learning curve, plus their bugs become your bugs. Open source/free software is a win here as there is almost always a larger development environment around the technology.
Re:and piracy killed music (Score:3, Insightful)
My work buys me adobe CS suite. Personally, if I needed to do work like that at home, I would never pay that much, I'd just free or cheap alternatives.
Re:and piracy killed music (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:and piracy killed music (Score:5, Insightful)
Free market economics work because people in the market make "rational" choices. The underlying assumptions may be flawed and the choices may be wrong but this is still part of the market. Make the wrong choice and you go broke because in a free market you are free to be an idiot and go broke. However, if you make smart choices and DON'T go broke, this is STILL the market at work, because the market is still just the composite behavior of people buying and selling things.
The key word here is "free", because if you are the dominant player in a market the most natural thing to do is control the market so it's more difficult to compete by the inherent value of your good or services alone. Various methods can be used to accomplish this and various laws exist to discourage this. If you are successful in eliminating your competitors you have a monopoly. Still with me? Good boy!
This is the tricky part - monopolies can STILL be viewed as part of a free market and the collective behavior of people in response to the monopoly is ALSO part of a free market. For example, Microsoft used every dirty trick in the book to create a virtual monopoly in the operating system market. The market responded with rampant piracy and theft, but also with free open source operating systems. The reason this occurs is because people are smart and don't like being screwed. Microsoft, along with big media corporations use their vast, monopoly generated profits to buy political support for draconian IP protection laws in order to legislatively protect their monopolies. They view this as necessary because the market value of an electronic copy of their products is practically zero. This is due to virtually unlimited production and distribution at extremely low cost. The market continues working.
Still there? Good boy!
There's no practical way to prevent these types of abuses since people are greedy and politicians are whores. However, the market is PEOPLE (kind of, but not exactly like soylent green) who are smart and don't like being screwed. Existing IP monopolies relied on the difficulty involved in copying and ditributing the content; you had to buy a vinyl record or cd or videotape or DVD - essentially that was the SAME as buying a copy of the IP since they couldn't easily be copied or distributed.
Oops! Here comes Digital Audio Tape! The monopolists killed that one quick because they knew it would eventually put them out of business. Wait, what's that thing called? The INTERNET? Awww, shit! Instant production and distribution! Our evil schemes are failing! To congress!
So, thank goodness for the market because no matter what kind of IP protection rackets they come up with, people find ways around them. Meanwhile the IP monopolist's traditional business models are failing, since it's possible to produce and distribute alternatives for virtually nothing. What were they selling, a cd or the recorded music/software? What about radio? Ad suppported-a different revenue stream, Hmmm. The ball is in the free market's court right now. These companies will either find a new way to sell their products or die on the vine.
The moral of our little story? Don't confuse capitalist economics or a free market for monopolistic behavior by bad actors in the market. That's like blaming the henhouse for the wolf. Now be a good boy and go to bed.
Re:and piracy killed music (Score:3, Insightful)
Why is Microsoft SourceSafe dead? Because it didn't save any more time over the free software revision control tools. How about ClearCase? It's getting old and newer, more nimble systems like GIT, GNU Arch, and Mercurial are replacing it. Sure, CLearCase has a few unique features like build avoidance, but how useful is that in comparison to its huge annual cost, especially when you consider that it doesn't always work right?
I'm sorry, but your argument seems rather weak to me.
How else MS became so popular (Score:3, Insightful)
Similarly for other cheap products.
Re:and piracy killed music (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:and piracy killed music (Score:5, Insightful)
*Grits teeth* No, I don't want commercial tools regardless of quality. I want each tool to be evaluated on its merits, and I want alternatives in each category. Sometimes the commercial tools are good alternatives, sometimes not. If the commercial tools go off the market, then I lose choice. If my organization won't pay for tools, then I lose choice. Both are bad.
I am not in opposition to FOSS. I make my living writing exclusively FOSS; I am privileged in this respect.
Yes! I agree! See informed, rational decisions, lack of, in other posts of this thread.
Re:and piracy killed music (Score:5, Insightful)
The part that doesn't follow for me is that tools failure implies unpaid overtime. Things go wrong you go straight back to management and sort it out - pressing on regardless is never the answer, especially when it's on your own time.
Re:Why complain? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:and piracy killed music (Score:4, Insightful)
Why doesn't the company just give you pen and paper and tell you to program with them..
Re:and piracy killed music (Score:4, Insightful)
In other words, the management sees "Free!" and think it saves them money but ultimately it might cost more in a non-obvious way.
Let's use the requisite car analogy: You can get a FREE used car from a friend-of-a-friend or pay $5000 for a similar used car from a reputable dealer. Which do you choose?
If you go for the free car, and it ends up needing $8000 worth of repairs over the next six months just to keep it road-worthy, maybe that $5000 car would have been a better deal.
=Smidge=
It's not so simple. (Score:5, Insightful)
In a vacuum, that's perhaps true, but nothing is. It's the economics equivalent of one of those first year physics problems where you pretend all projectiles are perfect spheres and encounter no wind resistance.
For example, maybe the poster would have done something else useful for his employer during the non-overtime time that he wasted with the inferior tool, something that would have been worth more than $200.
Or, maybe it drives the poster to change jobs and work at a company that will actually pay for the tools it takes for him to be most productive. I've done exactly that in my own career. Time spent as a developer trying to solve some business problem with code is fulfilling to me; time spent as a developer wrestling with a shitty tool is not. I guarantee that the costs involved in finding and hiring a replacement developer are more than $200.
(For the record, I've worked for a company that insisted on non-free tools for everything, and I've worked for a company that refused to play for anything. They're both wrong.)
Re:and piracy killed music (Score:5, Insightful)
No, I won't be baited into rooting for communism, so don't go asking me what the alternative is. I'm saying "capitalism is broken". I don't need to suggest an alternative in order to make that assertion.
OT: Too many String libraries (Score:3, Insightful)
To be completely honest, I found string.h the most usable of all the libraries. It was straight forward and you knew you were holding live dynamite in your hand. If you went outside the bounds, you blew your leg off. It was a simple indexable array and after I use more and more libraries with NIH syndrome, I really miss the simplicity of a simple string.h. I even find myself constantly doing a myString.c_str() cast constantly when I use C++ these days because it's the only thing that's really compatible with everything else, for sure. I'm so sick of string libraries and pre-parsing before I can parse. OK, sorry for that rant, but it's been brewing for a while now. And I'll save up my VB6 variant rant for another day.
Re:and piracy killed music (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:and piracy killed music (Score:4, Insightful)
Software companies selling stuff for more than it's worth go under. And you lose choice. But the fact that there are other competitors selling inferior things cheaper is only good. In fact, the original company has the opportunity to change the price to the real market value, that in some cases drops to zero. That is a good thing, not a bad thing.
I think you have a wrong idea of free software and open source. No-cost or non-commercial was never a goal. Free software is intended to be free as in freedom, they can charge as much as they want, only most people choose not to. When I sell free software, I charge, usually because I build custom software. Free software is usually commercial.
If you want your manager to buy the tools you want, free software has nothing to do with it. You could make the comparison of management buying some cheaper propietary package you didn't want just because it was cheaper to acquire than the one you wanted. The fact that free software can be acquired for no cost doesn't make a difference. It has nothing to do with the "FOSS"/commercial false dichotomy.
Re:Why complain? (Score:4, Insightful)
I switched away from Emacs because I wanted to program with an editor, rather than program the editor.
Re:and piracy killed music (Score:3, Insightful)
Blame Borland, not open source (Score:5, Insightful)
In the early days I remember paying a lot of money for tools like Watcom-C (32 bit DOS/4GW development - $895 - the hottest optimizing compiler of the day), Instant-C (C interpreter for rapid prototyping/debugging - $695?), BRIEF ($195 - one of the best commercial editors ever - I still use BRIEF-compatible Emacs key assignments), some profiler I can't even remember the name of, etc, etc.
When Borland Turbo Pascal was introduced it completely changed the software tool pricing landscape. This was a very high performing comiler, with an IDE that included tools that would otherwise have been seperate (editor, debugger, profiler), all for a ridiculously low price (WikiPedia says $49.99 - I'd forgotten). While the integrated editor/etc may not have been as good as stand-alone alternatives, it was good enough for many people and pretty much spelt the death of multi-hundred dollar a la carte tools. The performance of the Borland compiler also forced Microsoft (who's optimization in the early days wasn't very good) to up their game which also helped kill the market for non-IDE optimizing compilers.
More recently of course Linux and open source tools have kept some competetive pressure on the tools market, but I really see Borland as being the start of the end for a market for software tools at prices that make them an attractive proposition for dedicated tools vendors.
Re:capitalism is a shell game? what?!?! (Score:5, Insightful)
To start with, there's no requirement that a society needs to be capitalist to use a working free market. There's no inherent contradiction in having a free market in a socialist society, for example - the thing that would define such a society as socialist would be how capital is allocated, while the selection of providers of services and products could be left to the free market.
Personally I'm a strong believer in socialized medicine, for example, but at the same time I wouldn't see a problem with a system where private providers competed for the "business" of people needing treatment, while the base payment is provided by government. After all, the goal of socialized medicine isn't for the state to run hospitals, it's for the state to guarantee a certain level of medical services to all.
You may notice that most European countries operate somewhere along a scale from completely government operated services, to a hybrid model. Some indeed shows signs of both - the UK National Health Service is one of the largest employers in the world, with 1.3 million employees (depending on who you believe and how you count it's it could be considered the 4th largest employer in the world after the Chinese Army, Walmart and Indian national Railways), at the same time a lot of services are outsourced to private companies, and both GP's and dentists that gets some or all of their income from the NHS compete for business.
I'm politically far to the left of the sitting UK Labour government, yet I actually wish they'd open up larger parts (most) of the NHS to free market pressures, as long as they keep their eyes on the goal of providing top quality healthcare for everyone.
In fact, some would argue that a lot of government intervention that they support should be done in the form of markets. CO2 quotas being one example: Create a competition driven market to achieve the government goals rather than set hard requirements, as it acts as an incentive for innovative solutions that you're unlikely to have thought of from the outset.
But apart from all of this, which is not dependent on a capitalist society (to make that clearer: none of this require private ownership of capital even - a free market can still function in a society where all actors are private citizens or publicly owned companies instead of privately owned), a free market is only effectively allocating resources when two conditions are met:
Looking at for example the cellphone and broadband markets you see a classic example of when more regulation actually contribute to more competition, because it prevents monopolies from strangling the market:
Several European countries have extensive unbundling of services baked into their laws. In Norway, for example, the network operators are required by law to offer unhindered access to their networks by third parties at "cost plus" terms (they can charge their cost plus up to a certain margin), and at the same time all operators are limited as to how long contract periods they can require as part of handset bundles.
This has created a massively competitive market for operators, with a large number of "virtual operators" that don't own their own network, and at least one operator with only a limited network that depends on roaming in rural areas. In all I believe there are more than 40 GSM and 3G operators in Norway, with a population of about 4 million. That's a testament to successful re
Open source is improving commercial tools (Score:2, Insightful)
At work we use MyEclipse which is a $30/year subscription. It is mostly a package of open source extensions with a few proprietary closed-source ones.
Commercial tools no longer have to do all the work of building an IDE, they just have to create extensions on top of Eclipse.
The Market is ALIVE (Score:3, Insightful)
Because these tools vendors work from that most common commercial fallacy: the supply side power trip. People who say "hmmm, I've got this thing, now who will buy it?", not "who wants something, and how do I give it to them?" People who think of the market as their servant, customers like sheep to fleece, or really that they're doing customers a favor by serving them.
The reality of successful commerce is to find what people in markets want, and then find ways to give it to them. Ways that send value to the market that's recognized enough to expect value delivered back to the vendor, measured in money.
There's lots of ways to do that, depending on the specific market and what it wants, how it's delivered, and what the vendor will take in return. But here's something that hasn't occurred to these tools vendors: their tools are ways of communicating with APIs. The tools contain expertise in those APIs, automated for the tool user. If tool vendors really sold subscriptions to their API expertise, they could capture an audience. A grand "API support" system, that included help desks (by email/web/phone), training, seminars, reference documentation and source code, training with executable libraries, and yes, the tools. Give away the tools, open the source, invite the community into the tools source development. That ecosystem is worth real money to serious developers who make money from them (and serious hobbyists who take their hobby seriously). Giving away the tools that support their API support, in their specific style, with their specific tool APIs, would harvest all those people who need help. Every copy of their tool that people share for free should have a 1-click (or commandline) that connects them to commercial support, for a fee (though giving away a few sessions is also good marketing).
The tools market will of course only grow, as the industry globalizes, and gains ever more value through the "network effect". Tools vendors aren't the prom queen anymore, since tools development is so wide open, built on the underlying open source OS'es and apps (and other tools). They have to cater to the real needs of the market. For which this huger, richer market will pay. But not anymore because they're just told to pay. Now the vendors have to ask, nicely, with gifts. Or they're as dead as they say the market is now.
Re:and piracy killed music (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:capitalism is a shell game? what?!?! (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
First off, the way to create a fair and equitable society is to recognize that people are not born free. The real world imposes requirements upon us, and those requirements must be met.
To be strong, self-sufficient and confident individuals, we must meet these needs through the direct application of our own power. We cannot yoke our fellow man like a horse to meet our requirements for us, because doing so strips us of our individuality transforms us into dependent parasites. We must do it ourselves, and we cultivate the capacity to do for ourselves within ourselves, and within each other.
The right economic model to deliver this is communism, without currency. No taxes. All contributions to be paid in labour, all people to contribute to each industry that sustains life to the best of their capacity.
Everyone, from the top to the bottom, does their time in the industries that create our food, our shelter, our power, etc.
This means spending some of your time in the areas you're good at, demonstrating to your peers that you're a skilled asset in that area, and being given the opportunity to lead by those who recognize that you have something to offer that they do not.
It also means spending some of your time in the areas you're not good at, recognizing your limitations, and learning to recognize the people who surpass your limitations so you know who to be led by, for your own self-interest.
This is how you create a self-reliant and informed population.
This would reduce the workload on all people dramatically, because we wouldn't have a vast multitude of people dedicating their entire lives to creating things which do nothing to sustain anyone, but merely titillate the fancy of our ruling class.
Once you have such a strong population of informed individuals, you need a democratic process to allow them to co-operate.
But not a democratic process like we have now. What we see in the world today is a joke, in which we are given a short list of unappealing rulers, and we must choose one who will rule over us for years, with no capacity to change our mind should we be betrayed.
What we need is a democratic process that leaves us always in control of our own political voice, small though it may be in a crowd so large.
Ideally, this would mean direct democracy, in which all people vote directly on all issues, in the fashion of the Romans. But this ideal would require that we have infinite time to inform ourselves, and to gather the opinions of those we trust more than ourselves to answer specific concerns.
So, the way to solve the problem is to allow us to embed expressions of our trust into the system, and have those expressions be under our control.
We allow everyone to vote directly on each issue, and we allow them to choose instead to vote for any individual they wish. If they choose to vote for an individual, that individual gets the extra vote transferred to them, to wield as they see fit.
The "vote", the "transfer of power", this should be revocable at any time, and all votes cast should be part of the public record, with no anonymity. This way, there's no power usurped under false pretenses and wielded in an arbitrary fashion without consequence during some arbitrary political term of office, which is what we see so much of today.
In such a world, people would remain strong individuals, understanding of how their life is maintained. They would have no need to prey on each other. They would have developed as much knowledge, wisdom and experience as
Re:and piracy killed music (Score:3, Insightful)
That's something that open source writers do not really understand: users don't really care about what's under the hood. We're not living in perfect world, either.
Re:and piracy killed music (Score:3, Insightful)
More Marxist stuff.
Article has nothing to do about free tools letting the proletariat stage their own worker's rebellion against that bourgeois "wage-slave" line. Nor does it have anything to do about the "teach a man to fish" proverb.
The article assumes that some commercial tools are better than free ones. But people tend to pick the free, not-as-polished ones over the expensive, whiz-bang ones out of preference and comfort. Even if the expensive whiz-bang ones could save you weeks of work in the long run or thousands of man-hours of development time.
"Fictional scarcity" is a product of politics. I don't know what flawed definition of "capitalism" you adhere to, but even classical Adam Smith invisible-hand-esque economics handle the lack of scarcity perfectly well - infinite supply, zero cost. But, pre-digital times, this wasn't an interesting case to economists - everything was scarce.
Re:and piracy killed music (Score:3, Insightful)
Management is making a choice which pushes the cost of the software from the company (in the form of license fees) to the employee (in the form of unpaid overtime). Then, the poster, who has apparently never worked at a real IT job, suggest that the PP pay for the tool himself, which again pushes the cost to the employee, and also is probably impractical as most business only let one use "approved" software tools.
Re:Visual Studio still seems to be selling (Score:3, Insightful)
While I think open source is progress, it's not the benevolent hand of Historic Destiny at work. It's necessity mothering invention, or in this case, re-invention.
Commercial embrace of open source is a reaction to the inability to compete against an entrenched monopoly. In order to survive, you choose a business model which doesn't require you to sell anything in a product class that Microsoft "owns". If you remember the dark days before the dot com boom got rolling, there was real sense of gloom among software entrepreneurs. There was a sense that it was almost not worth trying, because if you had a good idea MS would grab it and squash your product.
Then came the dot com boom, and suddenly the land rush was on, and nobody wanted to pay rent to a landlord. It was like the olden days when software was given away with hardware: the software had to be there, but it wasn't where the profit was. The software license bonanza had been bust for years, dead by the hand of its greatest beneficiary.
Open source is good for programmers and good for customers, and it is a fact of life for vendors.So much of the software business revolves around whether you drink the MS kool-aid or not. The anticipated but not quite here mobile boom in the post dot com era was wishful thinking -- to create an end run around MS by going straight from server to phone or PDA. It might still happen.
UNA should have been an Eclipse plugin (Score:3, Insightful)
I think the guy is bitter because he reinvented the wheel, and now nobody is using his wheel. If he would have created an Eclipse plugin, he wouldn't have had to write the portion of the software that he's now giving away. He could have concentrated on the collaboration part.
Honestly, I don't really get what UNA buys you over the combination of Eclipse, Mylyn, SVN, and an IRC or IM plugin. I can't imagine that I'd want someone typing in the same file I'm working on.
Re:and piracy killed music (Score:4, Insightful)
For example, Eclipse IDE has not killed IntelliJ IDEA because IDEA is a f*ing great IDE. VIM has not killed TextMate on Macs, GIMP has not killed Photoshop.
I looked at UNA and I'm completely underwhelmed. It's a mediocre tool at best.
Good lord... (Score:3, Insightful)
And guess what? If it's good enough (i.e. you can show enough value) it might succeed.
However the free-market doesn't entitle anyone to success. So lets stop the FOSS bashing and move on.
Re:It's not so simple. (Score:2, Insightful)
There is nothing managers strive for more than to be in a vacuum. Having the freedom to make decisions without being encumbered by acres of details allows projects to move forward.
Unfortunately, the details managers don't consider get moved onto my shoulders.
Try telling your boss to include you before making a significant business decision - see how far you get with that.
Vacuums sell.
Re:FOSS isn't Free (Score:3, Insightful)
Commercial vendors will likely never be gone. They'll just be commercial vendors creating OSS instead of closed and proprietary tools.
I think you're making an incorrect assumption. In my experience, most OSS is done by commercial companies like IBM. Many of them are smaller and make proportional contributions. For the most part though, they're doing it for profit.
So as I understand your theory, you fear that if only OSS solutions are left, they will suck for usability. So IBM has thousands of people using some OSS tool and the usability is poor. Do you think they're going to just ignore that wasted money and not pay someone to improve the usability? Do you think the same is true for all the big and small users of the tool? I don't think so. One or more companies will always step up to improve tools because they need to use those tools to make money and improvements mean more efficient use of workers' time.
What is he talking about? (Score:3, Insightful)
What about Textmate? Visual Studios? Araxis Merge? Fog Bugz?
If anything the market for development tools has massively expanded. It's true, closed source developers have to work hard to stay ahead of the open source curve, but plenty of companies have succeeded at this.
Frankly, the spit and polish benefit of software developed by a company with UI experts, QA people, and all the other roles that are usually absent in open source teams tend to create more usable software, and even developers care about usability in their tools. The idea that most developers don't mind piece of crap UI's is a myth.
That's not to say there aren't good open source tools. Obviously, GCC is good, and there are numerous open source editors. However, having used both sets of tools extensively, I can assure you that the open source dev tools world still lags behind significantly.
Re:UNA should have been an Eclipse plugin (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:and piracy killed music (Score:3, Insightful)
Once I got done putting myself through school (first in the extended family with an advanced degree), we had a few kids and I started a business that through continuing very hard work has afforded my family and me a modicum of independence and financial security. I bought equipment with my own money and incur both the risks of financial failure and legal liability. If the business continues to do well, it may be possible to use the money I've earmed to expand the business, providing employment for others and contributing increased tax revenue to my community.
I don't need ideology to get to sleep at night since I'm generally too tired from work and family to stay awake much past 9. What keeps me awake is knowing that somewhere there exist dimwits that can't tell the difference between a free market, a
monopoly and a corrupt government. What causes me to lose sleep is that the world contains numbskulls who think what I've done to improve my own life, the welfare of my family and my community is somehow wrong. The government takes about 50% of my earnings in various ways and I do admit that I'm annoyed at how that money is often spent. Perhaps I should rejoice instead that so much of the fruits of my labor are given to help those less willing to wor....Oops less fortunate than I.
If you are so sure of yourself, could you please tell me where I've gone wrong in life so I can correct it.
Re:and piracy killed music (Score:3, Insightful)
However, a lot of people DO want to buy it. I bought it for my company, for example, because IDEA+TeamCity combination results in a real productivity boost (which will save me money).
The same thing with Jira+Confluence - there's a ton of free bugtrackers and wikis but they are far inferior compared to Jira+Confluence (in corporate environment, at least). As a result, Jira+Confluence is now 'enterprise standard'.
I can give several more examples. Good and innovative commercial software has nothing to fear. And I don't really mourn the death of mediocre software.
Re:and piracy killed music (Score:3, Insightful)
I have plenty of respect for the opinions of a chinese coal miner, though the definition of "risk" is subjective. In my case it also involves occasionally working with infectious materials that are very definitely fatal. Collapsed mine, HIV, what's the difference if you're dead? Oh, the miner doesn't have to worry about being sued by gold diggers.
Greed and selfishness destroy any scheme you can come up with. Have you heard about the UN aid workers in africa trading relief supplies for sex? What makes you think good intentions will change anything? At least in a capitalist country you have a mechanism to harness the ambitions of the greedy. By the way, some of my classmates were Vietnamese immigrants who were VERY glad for the chance to go to school. You see, the communist government there made life rather difficult.
I never mentioned race so who's biased here? My classmates also included Iranians, Lebanese, Nigerians, Ghanans, Koreans, Chinese (sorry, no miners), Taiwanese, Indians, Pakistanis, Russians, Jamaicans, Trinidadians, Barbadians and Canadians. Some stayed, some went back home. Every single one worked their freaking asses off. Every single one took responsibility for their own welfare.
The thing keeping people down in most 3rd world countries is political corruption and oppression, not free market capitalism. One of the most effective methods for spreading wealth around is microloans - check out http://www.kiva.org/ [kiva.org] and yes I've donated. The idea of helping entrepreneurs is particularly appealing to me since it goes directly to the people who will use it best. People all over the world prove themselves smart and hardworking once you give them a shot. What's better - giving a man a fish or teaching him to fish? If you just send over a bunch of food aid you end up with dependent refugee populations.
You don't know me and you certainly seem to prefer personal insults instead of reasoned discourse. Unfortunately your approach is rather sophomoric. In fact I'd lay twenty bucks that you're no more than a 2nd year university student, which is rather generous since you seem to be so confused about the definitions of a few simple concepts.