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 piracy killed music

and gasoline killed steam, and steam killed sail, and sail killed slave rowers...

Its called progress.

Re:and piracy killed music

Extra, extra! Better, cheaper tools make worse, more expensive ones unsellable! Film at 11.

Re:and piracy killed music

Extra, extra! Better, cheaper tools make worse, more expensive ones unsellable! Film at 11.

Doubtless. But inferior, cost-free tools sometimes make better, commercial ones unsellable. That is the tragedy.

Re:and piracy killed music

Tragedy? That's free market in its purest form!

Re:and piracy killed music

That is bullshit.

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

They'd rather waste time (=money) or lose quality (=money due to cost of fixing later) than spend capital.

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:and piracy killed music

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.

My experience is that buyers at all levels won't do that when there's a cost-free alternative.

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:and piracy killed music

No it's not progress. It would be if OS tools provided an actual better and more advanced way of writing software. But as the article says, OS development tools have no technological advantage; The only advantage is they're free.

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.

Why complain?

If you want to complain, use emacs. That will give you a whole set of (other) reasons.

Re:Why complain?

Actually I find that I use Notepad++ these days, it does enough of what Emacs does ...

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."

Don't let the door hit you on the way out...

"Some developers would rather quit their job than be forced to use a new editor or IDE."

And I suspect their bosses would be glad to be rid of these prima donnas. Nothing says "value" like "I refuse to learn!".

Re:Don't let the door hit you on the way out...

I'm a developer myself, and a somewhat average one at my company. (I use vi and I do ok.) The real superstars have gone through half a dozen different editors and they all have their preferences, but not one of them would complain for more than five minutes if they were required to standardize on one to streamline the team. Management does listen to them, because they have great development ideas and don't get all pissy about the small stuff.

It's a myth that coders are precious flowers that have to be pampered to be productive.

Really?

"Some developers would rather quit their job than be forced to use a new editor or IDE."

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:Really?

So to summarise, paying staff to work on a base product is "welfare" and harms the overall economy, but paying them to work on something "advanced" does not.

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.

In the meantime...

... we are all richer as we get for free functionalities that would cost thousands of dollar without open source.

Sorry, N-BRAIN, but your website looks like sh*t.

No wonder nobody buys your stuff. Your online presence gives me the creeps. Quite literally actually. I feel sick watching that presentation and listening to that irritating music. I wouldn't download your tool for free, let alone buy a product from a software company that presents itself like that. No f*ckin' way. And I'm a guy that actually does buy software.

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.

The answer is simple - They're charging to much.

The real reason people have trouble selling commercial Editors, IDE's, and Compilers is because they charge to much. Many if not most programmers get this thing in their head that once they have written one program, they should never have to work again. They charge over $100- and in some cases over $500- for a compiler or editor and then expect a small company with 3 or 4 developers to buy a full license for every developer and every computer that developer uses.

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

I've heard this kind of lament before: "GCC killed the market for compilers." Complete nonsense, of course. There is still a healthy market for good compilers -- gcc is not the be-all end-all of compilers; and niche platforms, such as 8-bit microcontrollers, are mostly under-served by the Open Source solutions. And, incredibly, people are still paying ridiculous sums for Visual Studio.

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

Also

Also Home fucking kills prostitution!

and people who'd rather quit their job, than embrace new technology, are no loss IMHO

Just not YOUR tools

People are plenty willing to pay for tools, even just code editors. MS makes a pretty penny from Visual Studio, and TextMate is considered the must-have editor on the Mac. The real lesson is that there are plenty of open source tools for basic tasks, you have to offer something unique in terms of integration or usability to be a commercial success. Sounds like this company is upset that their "good enough" tools can't compete with free tools that are also "good enough".

IntelliJ IDEA

I pay for a dev environment, the one from JetBrains, for Java development. I do that because: I loath eclipse: it's a god-awful, slow, clunky, everything that's wrong with open-source GUIs, editor. Second because I need support for code completion, api prompts/look-up and my favourite editor (TextMate) doesn't support that, although it's great for everything else. So I pay a couple of hundred GBP for a decent editor that it doesn't hurt to use. Bad workmen only blame their tools because they chose crappy ones to use. I pay for quality.

And?

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?

Re:Urg

They're not giving away the editor with the integrated chat. They were "forced" to release the personal edition of their collaborative editor at no charge.

1. Slashvertise crippled version of your program.
2. ???
3. Profit!!

Re:Visual Studio still seems to be selling

I usually don't reply to AC, but what the hell...

I don't know what compiler versions you are talking about.
VC6 was not iso compliant. No wonder. the ISO standard wasn't ratified at that time.
But g++ 2.95 scored equally bad, or worse.
VC++8.x and 9 are very compliant, and on par with g++.

Sure VC++ has compiler extensions, but so does g++, which litters the global namespace with ISO non-conformant functionnames (snprintf).
However, VC++ also has a switch that turns it into ISO mode, allowing not a single compiler extension.

And I don't know if you know, but a lot of headers (string for example) are supposed to come WITHOUT the .h extension.
string.h is a C include header. string is a C++ include header.
But hey, at least you're a respectable programmer. Me, I use whatever tool I need to get the job done.

Re:If you did RTFA, you should be able to solve th

A riddle:
If Ctrl + O opens a file, what does Caps Lock + Ctrl + O do?

OPENS A FILE.