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.
and piracy killed music (Score:5, Interesting)
Its called progress.
Really? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Don't let the door hit you on the way out... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Don't let the door hit you on the way out... (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
interesting serious piece of article (Score:4, Interesting)
"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!
And? (Score:5, Interesting)
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?
Re:In the meantime... (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:A Complete Load of Fetid Rabbit Droppings (Score:1, Interesting)
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.
Re:and piracy killed music (Score:4, Interesting)
Pure free-market economics assume that the players are making rational informed decisions. In software acquisition, that assumption fails often.
If the more-expensive tool saves time worth more than its cost, then the appropriate free-market choice is to invest. My experience is that buyers at all levels won't do that when there's a cost-free alternative. They'd rather waste time (=money) or lose quality (=money due to cost of fixing later) than spend capital.
Re:Really? (Score:5, Interesting)
Not at all. Economy's not based on what we'd like it to be, not based on anything moral or worthy, but simply upon what is. And if there's competition in a market for a code editor (or anything else at all) which is being distributed for no cost then the commercial entities have to compete against that product. Saying, as Mike Masnick, from Techdirt, asserts "that you can't compete against free" means that "you can't compete, period."
Product A achieves the same ends as Product B. Product A is free, Product B requires a payment. If there is no distinction between the two products except price, then many people will go for Product A, and will forgive a few quirks or bugs. I tend to assume then that Product B has to compete with this product to maintain, or gain, market share. This is why I tend to believe that there should be a basic free version. The paid-for version should have added value; whether it's advanced features and/or support is largely irrelevant; the point is that to justify the cost of the product there has to be more than just the basics, which can be acquired legally for free in the form of the FOSS.
Plus in the context of software, once it's been developed then there's no further cost (if distributed digitally) to producing another million copies (okay, there's the cost of servers and bandwidth) beyond the initial copy (and the bug-fixes, which I'd tend to assume are more or less negligible next to the original development cost). If a commercial entity wants to continue earning money for releasing a product it has to compete with the prevalent market conditions. If free software is your competitor then you have to compete with free.
My comment about 'welfare' was perhaps a little harsh or glib, though it was intended to contribute towards the point that continuing in the vein of the old market tradition (build it, sell it, profit, rinse and repeat) doesn't work so well when the sell it stage is removed. And expecting to continue to sell a product, when alternatives are available for free, is counter-intuitive at best.
Apologies if I offended anyone.
Re:Why complain? (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:and piracy killed music (Score:5, Interesting)
Technological advantages are not the only way you can have progress. Progress can be attained by, for example, having every programmer in the world be able to access affordable development tools. This goes to the advantage of everyone, and the disadvantage of those who want to sell development tools. Maybe they should just move on to the next product, or look for an alternate business model. It happens all the time to all kinds of companies.
I really think that we have reached a point where all development tools offer the same features, more or less. Maybe the point is that these software companies should move to something more than making source code editors which we can no longer distinguish from each other.
Re:and piracy killed music (Score:5, Interesting)
Not only that, but with the free software, you can see where they were lazy and messy and did a half assed job. Commercial software goes to much further lengths to conceal the messy, half-assed evidence from you, bringing peace of mind. And really, how much is your piece of mind worth?
capitalism is a shell game? what?!?! (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:and piracy killed music (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:and piracy killed music (Score:3, Interesting)
Ok, what real options have I ever heard of? Well, there's SharpDevelop (but its windows-only, and why not just use VS.Net then), and there's MonoDevelop (which is an unusable pile of garbage, but at least it runs on Linux).
This is really my main beef with
Re:The answer is simple - They're charging to much (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
Re:and piracy killed music (Score:3, Interesting)
No of course not. Listen, I don't want the free software to go away. I want it to fulfil its hype and be as good as the paid-for stuff. In cases where that hasn't happened yet, I want the commercial stuff still to be available.
Re:and piracy killed music (Score:4, Interesting)
The reason I point this out is that this is independent of free or not-free economic models. The reason free-market capitalism actually reduces choice for purchasers is that there are barriers to entry for production of a good. Some are regulatory (and thus would disappear in a true free market) but some are natural and cannot be removed from the equation.
One other thing to note... from an economists perspective, your productivity doesn't matter. Something may benefit some people and harm others, but the interests of the individual are meaningless -- what is important is the benefit to the economy (&hence, society).
Sorry if you have to take one for the team while OS tools catch up to proprietary tools, but that's the way the cookie crumbles.
Re:A Complete Load of Fetid Rabbit Droppings (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:Why complain? (Score:3, Interesting)
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.)
Re:IntelliJ IDEA (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:Which is why the free market is a fairy tale (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Just not YOUR tools (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
Re:and piracy killed music (Score:2, Interesting)
Please don't blame Capitalism for what is going on in the U.S. The term you are looking for is Corporate Socialism. Capitalism is simply the economic freedom to engage in self-determination. The United States is not now, nor has it ever been a capitalist country.
Open source software is a form of Capitalism. The highest form of capitalism: Anarcho-Capitalism based on mutual aid.
Re:and piracy killed music (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:It's not so simple. (Score:1, Interesting)
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.
Re:and piracy killed music (Score:3, Interesting)
For example, I use both Visual Studio and Eclipse (well, Zend Studio, but it's Eclipse wearing a funny hat). Eclipse is quite nice for my PHP development--not as nice as VS.PHP, but the difference in features between VS.PHP and Zend Studio is not enough to make me want to run out and buy VS.PHP. I'm sure Eclipse is okay for Java development.
Eclipse also has many large problems that have never been fixed despite it--gasp--being open source. Its version of IntelliSense has bugs up the ass, such as not always displaying private methods and member variables until you backspace and retype the object name (and if that was intentional, then somebody has some explaining to do as to where the hell their HCI guys were). These bugs are annoying enough that, despite Eclipse's arguably better features, I am less productive in Eclipse than I am in the closed source Visual Studio.
Right now, saying that open source tools are better than closed source tools is a joke. Even where OSS tools have more features, they almost invariably are kneecapped by a productivity-inhibiting interface. Closed-source software written by halfway intelligent people realize that productivity and user comfort come before all else, and write the code to that effect. Open source tools will never "kill" closed source tools until they are willing to actually spend some time figuring out what the user wants, not what the developer wants.
You missed the whole point, unfortunately... (Score:3, Interesting)
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...)
Re:and piracy killed music (Score:3, Interesting)
That's an interesting observation. One development tool that's outrageously expensive AND non-negotiably mandatory for anyone who writes apps that interact with an Oracle database somewhere is Toad. As far as I know, Toad is without free (as in beer AND liberty) peer in the Win32 universe. There USED to be a decent (not spectacular, but good enough to limp along with if management wouldn't cough up a kilobuck or so for Toad) alternative called ToRA, but Quest (Toad's owner) bought them up and effectively abolished the Win32 version. The Linux version still exists, though (thank ${deity}).
I *can* think of one specific area where non-free tools are overwhelmingly preferred over anything open-source: m68k embedded development. If you do professional m68k/coldfire development, you use CodeWarrior. Period. If I had to name the single worst mistake PalmSource made (and it's hard, because they made so many), it was the recklessly premature deprecation of CodeWarrior as Palm's official development platform. Cobalt didn't have zero developer interest or support because manufacturers weren't interested in it... it had zero developer interest because the only way to write native code for it was to use PODS... and PODS sucked. It probably wouldn't have sucked forever, but by sucking so badly at the point in time when PalmSource desperately needed developer support the most, it was the final nail in Cobalt's coffin.
There's a good reason, though, why good open-source IDEs ultimately triumph over even comparably-good or slightly-better commercial IDEs: freedom-as-in-liberty. You can argue forever whether IntelliJ is better or worse than Netbeans and/or Eclipse, but one thing is certain -- its version control support (or lack thereof) is an ideological decision of its developers. They happen to believe that version control should be handled externally. Unfortunately for Jetbrains, plenty of developers would rather have transparently-integrated CVS and Subversion support that "just works". Netbeans' core developers tried to go in the same direction (abolishing seamless integrated CVS support in favor of less-capable generic support), and quickly got beaten up by angry users who took matters into their own hands (always an option with open-source) and put it right back in, along with equally transparent support for Subversion. In the market for commercial software, all developers could do is bitch, and possibly refuse to buy future releases... hoping that the commercial software's vendor eventually gets a clue (and doesn't just blame falling revenues on piracy). In the OSS universe, end users (at least, the more motivated ones) can forcibly make changes on their own.
Re:It's not so simple. (Score:1, Interesting)
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.
Re:Evolve or die (Score:1, Interesting)
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.
Re:All you need is vi and ctags (Score:3, Interesting)
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.