Free! “I don’t think that word means what you think it means.” I urge you to listen to these talks:
http://itc.conversationsnetwork.org/shows/detail169.html
http://itc.conversationsnetwork.org/shows/detail662.html
http://itc.conversationsnetwork.org/shows/detail1502.html
We the Open Source community were never pirates. In fact a good many of the members of the community look to Free Software to avoid piracy. There are two separate groups here. The people creating and using Free Software and the people illegally downloading commercial software. Free Software as it’s defined by the GPL doesn’t even occlude commercial software and plenty of people pay money for Free Software. (if this sounds funny to you please search the web for ‘free as in free speech not as it free beer’) The Open Source and Free Software communities did not evolve from the pirate community as you seem to be implying and you should equate the two groups.
-mike
The “we need someone to sue” line has always troubled me. As a former law student, I know the vast degree of weight that exists behind established case law by those who practise it - it engenders a great deal of conservatism in legal advice; nobody wants to be the front runner. Nobody wants to set an adverse precedent.
And suing your software company and losing would create a disastrous precedent. Which is presumably why nobody has done it. There simply isn’t any legal support, as far as I’m aware, for the idea that someone could sue a software company for their shoddy software and prevail… and that’s even before the almost-certainly-unenforceable-at-least-that-is-until-some-court-decides-to-rely-on-them EULAs slapped all over it saying “we don’t even guarantee that it’ll load, and in any case it isn’t yours, we only let you use it”.
So in fact, this standard excuse isn’t just wrong - it’s worse than that; it’s actively damaging businesses by leading them into a false sense of security - and by encouraging them, because of that, to abandon the control they can have (the ability to get someone in to fix something as soon as it goes wrong, without further obligation) in favour of an illusory security predicated on the wholesale abandonment of control.
I cannot fathom what collective depth of stupidity would cause a business - any business, even a one-man operation - to embrace a policy so guaranteed to end in complete disaster…
“It’s tempting to ascribe this to the “cult of no-pay”, programmers and users who simply won’t pay for software no matter how good it is, or how inexpensive it may be. These people used to be called pirates. Now they’re open source enthusiasts.”
Thanks jeff, I support IP, I don’t steal music, movies, books or software, but every piece of software possible (excluding BIOS and CPU Microcode) on my computer is free software. Some of it really sucks, some of it is great, but it is free more than in price, it is free in freedom. If I really need to I can pay people to maintain this software, add features to it, etc. I have the freedom. I can’t pay ANYONE to improve microsoft windows. This isn’t piracy, this is freedom.
I respect the law, don’t slander me.
I came here to voice my objection to your statment:
These people used to be called pirates. Now they’re open source enthusiasts.
I’m not surprised to see I’m not alone. I think I understand what you meant, and have no objection to it, but what you actually said is just completely wrong.
Pirates are still pirates. Many open source enthusiast became so because they refused to be pirates. Given the choice between buying software, stealing software, and using open source software, I prefer to use open source. In very rare cases, I’ll buy software. That’s so rare I don’t rember the last time I made a purchase. I pay to use TurboTax online, once a year, perhaps that counts. But I never pirate software.
Open source enthusiasts aren’t opposed to spending money, we just spend it differently. I’ve got a copy of “Mastering Regular Expressions” by Jeffery Friedl (http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/regex3/) on my bookshelf and don’t regret the expense at all. I can’t see myself buying RegExBuddy, though.
-Marc
Good article buddy. Talking about free software, here’s a list that I found on the web lately that may keep some developers busy for weeks…
Looks like a lot of people misunderstood what you were trying to say there, about the pirates. Obviously open source users aren’t pirates.
Anyhow, I think the future of software is service, not products.
-Max
open source !== piracy
“These people used to be called pirates. Now they’re open source enthusiasts.”
Thank you for insulting single handedly Open source developers, users and contributors. Grow up and count me out as reader here.
The only software worth purchasing comes from Microsoft or Adobe. They could answer that question without even thinking about it. In my opinion, it boils down to user-experience testing. Most OSS solutions are pretty well-written and structured. They typically have the developer talent required to compete with the market share. But, do they have the monkeys sitting in a cubicle running the final product through it’s tedious paces, making notes on every tiny detail that could make it more user-friendly? Doubtfully.
I think that is the evolution of software pricetags.
“Anyhow, I think the future of software is service, not products.”
That’s a really good point. Companies involved in sponsoring OSS don’t do so because they think it’s the best way to directly extract revenue from the effort involved. I think it really amounts to a way to lower the cost of some grander goal by sharing effort where it’s not specifically valuable to what you, specifically, are trying to achieve. A student might contribute to an OSS project to gain experience and a resume line item that will get them a job. A consulting firm might contribute to or create an OSS product to sell consulting services. A hardware vendor might contribute to OSS to defray the costs of developing common components (kernel,etc.). In none of these cases is the OSS itself the ultimate goal.
The interesting thing about this are the reactions of closed-source vendors to open source competition. Microsoft moved downmarket with Windows XP in response to Linux on the OLPC. They’re now faced to deal with a competitive threat that is very difficult to manage, which is opposite from their history, when they were the difficult threat.
Please, let’s not associate software freedom with the act of attacking ships.
The goals of the free software movement are to create software that anyone can run, study, modify and distribute, including their own modified versions. The real opportunity for making money with free software comes from providing training and support services, as well as custom development. Plenty of companies are making a lot of money this way.
Software that does not give the user freedom is this way is uncooperative and unhelpful to those wishing to live in a free society.
The Free Software Foundation is one such organisation that seeks to educate the public about the issues of software freedom.
“It’s tempting to ascribe this to the “cult of no-pay”, programmers and users who simply won’t pay for software no matter how good it is, or how inexpensive it may be. These people used to be called pirates. Now they’re open source enthusiasts.”
Really, fuck you. I’m an open source developer and user, and haven’t used unlicenced software since I was a kid.
I have a strong resistance to pay software, but it’s not so much the fact that you have to pay–I mean I pay for hardware no problem…
The problem with Pay software is the way it tends to work.
I don’t want to pay for the bugs in your code or secondary installs. I’m paying for a working, top of the line piece of software. If the line shifts, I expect the software to shift.
If I paid $60 for a license for MS Word for Windows when it ran on Windows 3.0, I expect my license should still be valid today on whatever OS is still supported. I mean, if I had downloaded (FOR FREE) the first version of Open Office, I would have the latest and greatest today and it would run on any platform OO supported.
I also don’t expect to be bound to a disk. If I need to re-install, I expect that should be possible–I mean it’s a license not a disk you are buying, right? If the disk fails or is stolen or lost, my license should still be valid.
I shouldn’t have to pay more if I use the same software on 45 computers as long as I’m the only user of that software on all 45 computers. I have a license for the software, not the software on the computer with Serial # 309823745908.
When a company starts failing to maintain the license they sent to me, I should be able to do whatever I want with their software–in fact, I think software sources should be kept on file–and as soon as the company fails to fix a serious bug or update their software to the latest platform it should be released.
(This is much of what the patent office was created for–to ensure that good products weren’t lost and were eventually available to all–sure software patents suck right now, but if they were only valid for 2 years and after that they were published as public domain, then I’d be kinda open to the idea…)
There are a HELL of a lot of drawbacks to pay software that don’t exist in free software and not a single advantage to pay (except that in some cases there is no free equivalent.)
PHP is clunky but professional-grade and good enough.
MySQL is an insult to real RDBMS. It still has no interest in data integrity.
If you seriously think money is the issue and not freedom, you must have been living under a rock for the past decade, or overdosed on the Microsoft Kool-aid.
I’ll gladly donate to an open source project, but I the instances in which I’m still willing to use some closed source extortion scheme are few and far between.
And I do mean use, having to pay for it is irrelevant, besides the fact that it is adding insult to injury to have to pay for the privilege of not having any privilege…
Closed source is a licensing scam, more or less unique to the world of software. Most other stuff you buy you actually own, and you are free to resell it, take it apart, change it, fix it, learn from it, whatever. I’ll pay for software, I won’t pay to get screwed (unless you’re a hooker).
Linking the desire for freedom with piracy is pretty typical for the utter contempt some software makers have for their users. Never thought you would be one of them.
One more thing–real programmers don’t need tools to work with regular expressions.
What, there are tools to BUILD regular expressions other than text editors? Never knew they existed.
Flatly, if you need a tool to build a regular expression, you are in the wrong job.
And yeah, php is a toy language, along with asp and vb - it doesn’t mean people can’t do real work with them. I wont ever be one of them.
You windoze guys and your crappy pointy-clicky tools - you waste so much time moving the mouse around, I guess you don’t have time to learn how to do your job.
Software developers who will never pay for any software are selfish and mostly greedy. They among any people should know how much effort it takes to build a good software.
How would these same developers feel if other people never buy their software?
When I need a piece of software and can’t find a free version, my next step is to find a shareware or commercial software. If it’s one I would use on a regular basis, I will buy it. Because I know it will save me time which costs many times the software cost. I don’t understand why people do not think of this. They don’t blink to pay for a $30 dinner which lasts an hour but $30 for a software which is useful over and over is too much.
All these arguments in favor of ‘open source’ because you can see the code, and therefore trust it more, or that open source is innately better, or you can be sure of improving the tool once the developer has gone, are completely fallacious. I urge these people to look review their attitudes with a critical eye.
Being able to review the code is completely worthless. Take any substantial lump of code, even if well designed, and it will still require a considerable effort even from a top class programmer to understand how the code functions overall. Nobody has the time to reverse engineer a project, that’s why you used it in the first place right?
If someone is being paid to produce the software, they’re going to be able to dedicate more time to it’s construction. Open source software never seems to achieve the consumer level of usability as commercial software. Many open source projects are great, but they always seem to miss something critical. At least with commercial works you can ask the developer to implement a feature, with open source you’re told to do it yourself.
If a project is earning money there’s no reason it will become abandonware. Open source is full of half built projects that have been abandoned because the developer had to get a job or have a life.
Even if a commercial project becomes abandoned, you don’t automatically lose the functionality you paid for originally. The software still functions as well as ever. Besides, there’s no reason why an abandoned commercial product can’t be open sourced, which has happened in the past.
Great post, and it hits home well. For a majority of your readers too, I would think. We’re all Linux enthusiasts (secretly or openly), or would quickly prefer downloading some free software to do some dirty task easily and with little hassle.
I’ve come to realize recently though that yes, sometimes software does warrant the price tag it has. If not for the feature set, the polish, or the “premium experience”, then certainly for a quantifiable amount of support that goes along with it. (Read your post on MediaMonkey just recently, maybe that was the tipping point.)
Devs need to eat too. 
It think the rise of good free software is one reason companies like Microsoft’s are having to start giving away software in the form of express editions of visual studio (even if they are cut down).
@Nick 03:45PM
Why have you decided to become an open-source developer?
Don’t you know you are contributing many small companies to be closed down and leave many developers jobless because you just want to be known among a community that just want your source-code and if you are dying from cancer no one would donate money for your treatments?
Do you know you are actually helping the big corporate to become richer by killing the small companies?
Why can’t you be a man and try to make money out of your work if what you develope is good enough for so many people? If you are thinking you are helping others then you are killing others at same time.
If you are such a charitable person why don’t you donate 50% of your incomes to the charity instead and see how life is like then.
Be assured your work is worthless to me when at same time you are damaging others for the attention you are seeking. If you think you are a fighter aganist capitalism then be assured open-source idea was sponsored by giant corporates such as IBM, Sun and now Microsoft to kill all small competitions.
All these companies promote and sponsor open-source projects and at same time make bilion of dollars every year. Can’t you tell you have been fooled?
Hey Jeff - I really enjoy your blog, but please don’t jump the shark like Joel Spolsky and Paul Graham before you. Both wrote excellent programming articles and then gradually migrated to writing articles on managing people and creating businesses - and neither are as engaging or articulate as they used to be.
You haven’t done that yet - but I want to warn you (and plead with you) as you embark on your new adventure…
PHP was dangerously close to a joke language in 2000, but you can barely go anywhere on the web today without running into something huge built on PHP. I could say the same thing about MySQL – a toy database in 2000, but a totally credible free alternative to Oracle and SQL Server today for most uses.
No, seriously, PHP is still a joke language and MySQL still a toy database, these two are mostly the rise of mediocrity (and in PHP’s case, the only good thing I ever found about it: it’s completely and utterly trivial to deploy. Nothing else comes close).
“It’s tempting to ascribe this to the “cult of no-pay”, programmers and users who simply won’t pay for software no matter how good it is, or how inexpensive it may be. These people used to be called pirates. Now they’re open source enthusiasts.”
So, just because I don’t pay for software I don’t use, I’m pirate? Just because I prefer free software I’m a pirate? Just because I value my freedom above greed, I’m pirate?
Do you work now or ever for RIAA? Do have friends who work now or in the past for RIAA? Do you perhaps are training to work RIAA? I just though that of moronic reasoning would only be possible from someone working for or related to RIAA. I was wrong!
Yeah, really comparison between WinMerge and Beyond Compare. Lucky for you, by that time you hadn’t any credibility remaining.
Man, I’m really aching to throw a good insult, but I’m containing myself so that I’ll not lowered myself to your level. Bah!
Interesting. As it happens, I’d actually just (as in this very week) bought a copy of Beyond Compare, having had it thrust upon me as an alternative to WinDiff and the file difference viewer built-into Team Coherence. It was (is) great, and pretty intuitive, and given that it’s written in Delphi (my dev tool of choice), it just made me want to support it.
It didn’t actually occur to me to look for free/cheaper alternatives, simply because what I had been exposed to had already set the bar above what I was using before, and as I consider my time to be worth money the $30 or whatever BC costs was pretty-much immaterial to me. Converting to sterling and then into units of beer, $30 is about 5-6 pints of beer. 
Now you’ve told me there are better utilities out there, my geek-side will come back to the fore and the next time I have a spare lunchbreak, I have I’ll go looking for them and see if they offer me something I don’t have but would find useful over BC.
I do think that as software developers ourselves, it really shouldn’t pain us to spend a little money on tools that make our lives easier - especially if our time is worth money and these tools can save us time. I know not everyone sees it the same way, but that’s my opinion. I don’t mind when something that is great is offered for free; but then again, if it’s great, I actually don’t mind paying for it, either!
Anyway, glad to see that the blogging is continuing despite your change of employ.
Cheers
The Regex Coach (http://www.weitz.de/regex-coach/) works for me.
MySQL still a toy database
You’d have to explain that to me and, even if it were true (Sun seems to disagree), substitute Postgres or whatever and the point remains the same. I hate to be that commenter that posts just to link to themselves, but I did just post yesterday about what the reverse (insisting on “commercial” software) did to us as a development shop at my last gig: http://www.thosecleverkids.com/blog/2008/04/09/what-a-database-can-say-about-you/
the reason why I’m reluctant to use commercial tools for my programming work (or at least why I prefer a free solution over the commercial one at any time it’s doable) is not about the cost as such. It’s stability and availability. And reusability.
You see: There is no guarantee about commercial software. Will it continue to work once the manufacturer has gone away? Can I tweak the tool to all my needs? What if my needs change? Can I tweak the tool to do that?
What if some dependency changes? Can the tool adapt?
And then there is cost: How will the price of future versions of the tool in question develop? How much will it cost me if the requirements change?
These are all very difficult questions to answer and nobody can guarantee me that the answer stays the same for ever as priorities shift at vendors too.
In programming, I need the freedom that free software provides me with as it makes me independent.
The new 2.0 release of tool X provides interesting new features? Perfect. Let me upgrade! Of course, version 1.1 of dependency Y doesn’t work with that new release, but as I have the source, I can change it to accomodate the new interface. Or at least I can weigh in the value of the new feature in X against my cost of fixing up Y.
With commercial software, it’s the vendor of dependency Y that dicdates when (or even if) I can upgrade tool X. With free software, it’s me.
This can in some cases even mean a competitive advantage over other developers stuck at X 1.0 waiting for Y 2.0 to come out.
This is why I prefer the open solution at any time.
Philip
Sounds like Jeff’s developer community site won’t be free.
When I’m doing things for my employer. Yes there are many tools available for a small fee which would be useful to me at this very moment, they may not be the best but they work and I can find them. However to buy them I need to justify things to management …, Unless its somthing I’ll need very frequently There’s little chance of this so I’ll look for the free tool even if it takes me more time to find it and I have to mess around installing it well, it’s still easier then getting approval to buy something.
Programming as a hobby of course I’ll use the free tool. damnit I’m not getting paid for this, and I’m not using the software to make a profit, I don’t mind a little fiddling so I’ll use the free tool, or if I can’t find one I’ll do without.
and as an addition to my former theoretical posting: Every delphi developper should know what I was talking about
I’m sure I’m not the only one thinking this, but there are 2 types of “free” - “free as in beer” or “free as in free speech” (to almost certainly misquote the GPL).
Why should I, as a developer, care about this? If I invest time into installing/learning/training others on a product and subsequently find a show stopping bugs I need to be able to come up with a solution. This may mean submitting a bug report to Microsoft, Oracle, etc and waiting, asking a volunteer community on the web, or (if the licence permits) diving into the source yourself.
On the other hand if you’re using software provided free of charge and therefore typically with no warranty and the licence prohibits you from modifying it any way your stuck a certain creek without a paddle.
How much this matters to you will depend on how vital the software is. With a comparison tool a quick search will provide a range of alternatives, and you can re-learn rapidly. With server / end user software it’s not going to be that easy.
There have been times when I never did make a final decision between paying for software or getting the free alternative, so I ended up using both.
I use both Notepad++ and EditPad Pro (made by the same guy that makes RegexBuddy) all the time, even though they share many of the same features. Each had some features that it does better than the other, and I was willing to pay the extra money for EditPad Pro in order to have the best of both worlds (In EditPad Pro’s case, it was the great built in regex support).
I see a few mentions of Apache, PHP and MySQL here… all of which are excellent tools, used in the most demanding applications. IIRC Google and Yahoo use MySQL for instance… PHP is everywhere and pretty much everything big is hosted with Apache to my knowledge.
These are the best three examples of free software imo since many solutions you have to pay for can be replaced by one, or other, or both, or a cheap piece of software which uses all three together.
I’ve never used a good piece of enterprise managment software for instance… in fact they are all rubbish. Often costing as much as it would take to develop your own solution on top of free software whilst doing a substantially worse job, often violating UI guidelines and web standards at random… which is my primary objection to things like Oracle and SAP.
FYI, Beyond Compare is not resting on its laurels; a new version is in beta as I type. http://www.scootersoftware.com/beta3/index.php
I think this tool belongs in every developer’s utility belt.
Beyond Compare might have been the best file comparison tool and 'only ’ costs $30 but the real question is whether it is $30 better than a free tool. Are the missing features worth that?
Telling people in your team to try a free tool is an easy sell but asking them to play with a limited trial is less enticing because they might not be able to continue using it after the trial or even at home, in their next job etc. so why spend the effort learning it?
Bigger teams have recommended tools, procedures and policies. If the tool is infrequently used then that’s an even harder sell.
For a team of 30 developers spending $900+ on licenses for something that’s a bit better than free alternatives and rarely used is difficult to justify.
[)amien
Software is like sex, it is better when is free.
The investment you make when learning/mastering a SW is much higher than the cost of the product itself. So I prefer opensource sw exactly because my time is more valuable than money.
OpenSource sw has usually better chance to become an industry standard, and therefore be available everywhere. This makes your investment in learning less risky.
It seems irrational to me to use free software when there’s a better commercial alternative, especially when it’s for work purposes. If a $50 (or even $500) tool can help you save hours of work on your project, it is a very good investment for your company - and any tool that can save your project from disaster is worth quite a lot of money. Letting ideology get in the way of that is just bad business.
Of course, there are other costs beyond the price. But assuming all other factors are the same, the price should be pretty high for it to be rational to choose an inferior, free alternative.
As for Microsoft, I assume they give away express editions of Visual Studio to reach students and hobby programmers, for who price actually matters a lot, and who have a lot of freedom to choose and switch programming platforms. But for the software industry, platform is a longterm strategic choice. You don’t jump from .Net to Java or Python to save a little money.
But, beer isn’t free.
“It’s tempting to ascribe this to the “cult of no-pay”, programmers and users who simply won’t pay for software no matter how good it is, or how inexpensive it may be. These people used to be called pirates. Now they’re open source enthusiasts.”
I’ve been following your blog with some enthusiasm since I first discovered it some months ago, and I’ve always enjoyed your posts.
However, I feel that I must object to this statement, since it is an affront to an entire community of people - also, it simply isn’t true. I’ve only ever been impressed by the integrity of open source enthusiasts - they seem to always be very aware of what license is attached to whatever software they’re writing about, and to actually care about it’s terms, and what it does and doesn’t allow them to do.
In contrast, pirates just don’t care what the license says - they want the software (commercial or otherwise) regardless.
I always encourage people to use the FREE open source alternative to
almost anything but for some strange reason people always insist on using
the proprietary solution to their problem over the free one.
I think the problem lies with the common perception that “you get what you pay for”,
a good example would be why people shop at Grocery Store A insted of Grocery Store B because Store A charges higher prices despite the fact that Store B sells the same exact thing.
One of my most recent recommendations was to a group of gamers to use Mumble (http://mumble.sourceforge.net) over Ventrilo or Teamspeak but once
again I’ve run into the dreaded problem again and so they seem to think
that other clans will not respect them as much for using some unknown VoIP software over Ventrilo.
While we’re on the topic I recommend http://www.osalt.com which is a
database of open source alternatives to all kinds of proprietary software.
my biggest problem with “open/free” software that it is always a “me too” product. In short they copy the features/ideas and in lot of cases implement then is cra* way…
Why is it that open source cannot implement new ideas or create new products? Plus the licensing terms are bigger mad house, I know when I buy software I am not forced to part with my " Brain " but with GPL they go out of there way to get this done.
If something works well enough, that is one thing.
But I also see people put up with shoddily coded, memory-leaking UI disasters, and actually apologize for it, saying, “but, its open source, they’ll fix it eventually.” It is like the nature of being OSS excuses everything else that could possibly be wrong. I don’t relax my standards because something’s free or open source. If it is, that’s good. My concern is with getting things done, not trying to feel like I’m part of some cult.
I’ve paid for windows utils in the past,
and donated to open source projects lately.
Same difference there really, but the quality of
open source utils are much better IMHO.
Note Kdiff3 is a great free and open source cross platform diff tool,
which I’ve referenced in my comparison of diff tools:
Sometimes buying software isn’t so easy.
At work we’d love to get hold of a copy of Purify for Windows, but so far we’ve been unable to get hold of a licence. (The phone conversations between our guy and IBM were most amusing at the time, though I think we’ve just given up now.)
Robert:
“On the other hand if you’re using software provided free of charge and therefore typically with no warranty and the licence prohibits you from modifying it any way your stuck a certain creek without a paddle.”
Oh but, you see, the GPL explicitly allows you to modify the software.
It’s one of the four “fundamental software freedoms”, as they say. In fact, software that is free as in beer but not as in speech is getting hard to find. The only one I can name off the top of my head is Opera. (There’s also Visual Studio Express, but it’s been already mentioned.) So the risk of lockin should be easy to avoid.
One point that you’ve missed is the threshold that you need to get over when buying software. You need to fill out your credit card number on some strange website, jump through hoops with serial numbers etcetera. All in all, probably five minutes work, but a big threshold nonetheless.
I think a tool that costs $1, but is twice as good as a similar tool that is completely free, would still have trouble competing.
While I don’t in principle object to paying for stuff, there are some things I can do with free apps that are simply not possible with paid-for apps. For one, I can install them on as many computers as I like, whenever I like, without giving it a second thought. Paid-for apps might require me to buy multiple licenses to use on different machines. When I reinstall an operating system I might not have easy access to my paid-for apps - I might need to re-download or re-unlock them, I might need to dig out accounts and password details, or I might be right out of luck. Often it’s not possible or not worth the effort to evaluate a paid-for app without paying for it. I generally can’t recommend a paid-for app to friends and expect them to listen to me. Paid-for apps, while perhaps less likely to become unsupported, are more likely to cease to be available once no longer supported. All of this means that a paid-for app has to provide highly compelling reasons for me to favour it over a free app.
Strangely enough, what bugged me was the following:
“Consider how immature Linux development tools were in 2000 compared to what’s available today: Eclipse, Subversion, MySQL, Firefox.”
Spoken like a man who lives in the Windows world and reads blogs… the ignorance is astounding.
I don’t see why you guys are so big on “Free Software”. What would be the point in people going to school to get a degree in programming (Computer science) if people just want them to right free software.
I think one to blame for this - partially - is the whole Microsoft ecosystem.
The whole Microsoft ecosystem was greatly pay-to-use model.
I dont have a problem to support single free devs, but I dont want to throw money into strengthening any monopoly at all. (I states this in general, not related to the tool in question here btw).
If we dont want a monopoloy like Microsoft, then we need to give people alternatives. And I do not think any commercial alternative will work against Microsoft (in the end, MS could just buy that anyway)
“These people used to be called pirates. Now they’re open source enthusiasts.”
My trolling radar went into overdrive after reading this. You, sir, are a complete idiot if you can’t appreciate the difference between www.fsf.org and www.thepiratebay.com. Good day!
I’m not sure this is true. Barely anything I work with at work is Open Source, because of company policy that it has to be checked to meet certain benchmarks.
Can you give an example of an industry-standard Open Source product?
Uh, how about Eclipse (as well as products based upon Eclipse)? It has pretty much taken over the Java Tools market. It has relegated JBuilder, formerly a very expensive Java IDE to irrelevance
I find it ironic all vitriolic comments from OSS people. They spend alot of time trying to differiate “free” as in $$$/beer vs “free” as in freedom; but they miss the definition used here. Jeff was purely looking thru the lens of “free” as $$$ when comparing software. NOT the freedom of software – that quality is not the focus of his post. When thinking purely in terms of cost, the previous popular group of users that didn’t pay for software were pirates. NOW, people who don’t pay for software are typically OSS enthusiasts. He wasn’t equating the two groups.
I also find it hard to believe people think Jeff is degrading OSS users, when he’s a user of OSS software himself AND he’s publicily trying to RAISE MONEY FOR OSS DEVELOPMENT! C’mon people, context!
“OpenSource sw has usually better chance to become an industry standard, and therefore be available everywhere. This makes your investment in learning less risky.”
I’m not sure this is true. Barely anything I work with at work is Open Source, because of company policy that it has to be checked to meet certain benchmarks.
Can you give an example of an industry-standard Open Source product?
Also, for all those people who made the distinction between “beer and speech”, what Jeff’s just said suggests that there are many people who don’t make that distinction and won’t buy even Open Source projects that charge.
“One point that you’ve missed is the threshold that you need to get over when buying software. You need to fill out your credit card number on some strange website, jump through hoops with serial numbers etcetera. All in all, probably five minutes work, but a big threshold nonetheless.”
And honestly, that threshold is easy compared to how it is in a big corporation. You need purchase orders, and manager approvals, and it sucks. I’ve also been in situations where there were “spending freezes”, which meant nothing above $50 got purchased for months at a time. It’s a lot easier to just download a free alternative that works well enough.
(Also, when you replace 2 developers with 10 in India, you don’t want to be buying 10 versions of the software.)
"Yes, I also have to brush up on the regex from time to time. We don’t use software that costs money here, and last time I checked regexbuddy wasn’t free."
Look at that quote; looks like Free as in Beer to me.
If Regexbuddy switched to an Open Source licence, would they still be allowed to charge?
Expresso ain’t bad:
http://www.ultrapico.com/Expresso.htm
It even generates the regex code for you in the language of your choice.
The best tool I have used for building regular expressions is an editor called E-Texteditor (and yes, I was willing to pay for it).
It shows you what the regex matches in the document as you type it. Really nice interactive way to learn how to use them. There is a pretty nice screencast showing how it works (and teaching a lot about regexes) here:
a href="http://e-texteditor.com/blog/2007/regular_expressions_tutorial"http://e-texteditor.com/blog/2007/regular_expressions_tutorial/a
The cheatsheet from that blog article has also saved my bacon quite a few times
"It’s tempting to ascribe this to the “cult of no-pay”, programmers and users who simply won’t pay for software no matter how good it is, or how inexpensive it may be. These people used to be called pirates. Now they’re open source enthusiasts. "
There is one big difference: the license of the software being copied. If I copy MS Word, that’s an act of piracy: it’s forbidden by the license issued by the owner of the code. Open source software is just that, open, and licensed in such a way that makes it legal, and even encouraged by the owners of the code, to copy. I tend to like your blog, but in this case you’re just wrong, and wrong in a way that defames a large group of people who basically give away their time for free. You might not like what it does to the value of commercial software, but open source authors (and users) deserve better.
Masklinn : “No, seriously, PHP is still a joke language and MySQL still a toy database, these two are mostly the rise of mediocrity”
I think anyone making such a sweeping statement about a common language and database needs to quantify their statement with what they consider to be the professional (or at least non-toy) alternatives.
I’m sure the troll wouldn’t want to be put on the defensive when everyone starts tearing down his favorites.
I find that free software, unless shoddily made, is almost always less of a hassle than commercial software.
I don’t have to buy it, I don’t have to pay to upgrade, I can put it on as many computers as I want, it doesn’t try to milk me for more money, I don’t get crap bundled along with it, much of the time I can get help right from the people who made it, it doesn’t expire and stop working, it doesn’t stop working if I change a hard drive and all of a sudden it thinks it’s been stolen, it doesn’t have license numbers for me to lose…
Granted, there’s just some stuff that you want to pay for. Audio recording software seems to be one of these things, so I happily use paid-for Pro Tools (except when I change a hard drive and my favorite plugins shut down, because they think they’ve been stolen, and I can’t get the license numbers anymore because you’re only allowed to request new license numbers three times, and it wouldn’t matter if I did because the plugin freezes and hangs anytime I get to the screen to enter the license numbers, etc.!)
I’ll be honest. The word “free” pisses me off. I mean shouldn’t everything be free? Why should you have to work? Or pay taxes? I mean, wtf? Economies work on the idea that services and products are paid for. Someone works hard to create a product or provide a service and they deserve to get paid. It’s that simple for me. If it’s a good product/service they make money/thrive, the American dream, etc. If not, they fold and move on to something else. That’s the way. Software, automobiles, bananas, etc.
From your quote of Steven Frank:
The people who are most tenacious about exclusively using freeware whenever possible are usually incredulous that anyone would buy a commercial product when a free alternative is available. I’ve heard many times, “how can you guys make a living when free command line file transfer clients are included with the OS?”
It’s important context to note that the “commercial product” he’s referring to is Transmit, an FTP (and SFTP, and WebDAV) client. Hence the question referring to “free command line file transfer clients … included with the OS” as Transmit’s competition.
There is another reason why free will sometimes win out over a superior for-pay product. Paying for software for some companies involves budgets, purchase orders, corporate IT departments, vetting, “approved software lists”, etc, etc, etc. Free can be much lower friction.
if yoiu don’t pay for software why should people pay for things you make?
I agree that over the long term it will be hard for priced software to survive against open, free alternatives. In the short term, however, free software consistently lags behind in usability.
Best tool for the job plain and simple. If the “job” is my hobby, well, then I may be able to skimp on cost. If it’s free, great, it’s a no brainer. If it’s not well you have to weigh the worth.
One thing to consider in regards to buying the product, you are also buying the warantee, and support. If you’re company loses is hurt by a malfunction of the product, there is more recourse that you can take beyond leaving a nasty post in a forum. This is a serious consideration my friends.
On the matter of Beyond Compare, I bought it. Nothing is in it’s class at this time and it’s reasonably priced for single home developer use. If there was something that did all as well and more, I’ll consider changing. 
I suppose the readers of this blog and I are not to be compared with the non technical internet/software user. Most of us have the knowledge to come up with a crack because we know where to look.
I am realy sadened that co-developers who use software day in day out don’t want to pay 30 or even 50 dollars for it. These are developers that don’t take themselve serious. period. (I’m talking about the right kind of seriousness)
+1 beyond compare, it never failed me and I can’t come up with any new features that make it better. Maybe a 3 way comparision
+1 regexbuddy, this little tool makes it possible to improve your understanding of Regular Expression 10 fold. The knowledge and thus the $ (we are all information workers) I gain from this does not compare with the price Jan asks for this.
Um… people who are complaining about the pirate comment, he’s not saying “open source people are pirates”. He’s saying “in the past, if someone told you they used software and didn’t pay for it, the only plausible interpretation was that they were a pirate, because all good PC software cost money. Now there’s also good software available for free, and so that assumption is no longer correct.” Jeez, learn to read between the lines and/or get over your persecution complex.
Anyhoo, I think the “free software alternatives keep getting better every year” is the key observation here. I never buy software for my desktop machine, but I’ve bought several small shareware or commercial apps for my Treo, just because there isn’t a strong enough open source presence in the PalmOS community, and so $20 will get you much better Palm software than $0 will.
Sorry for a secondary posting but…
What bugs me about open source is that a bug or feature is up to how active the project is and how willing the project runners respond. Some are great, and hats off to them, but the others… And before anyone tells me to grab the source and do it myself, at that point, even billing my time cheaply, it’s cheaper to pony up the cash :-/
I realize that is my problem, not OSS, but there is something to be said for making/supporting a good product in order to get and maintain customers so you may buy food and shelter.
Regards!
I am a commercial software developer AND create open source software. I use both commercial software and open source software to get my work done. You are seriously out of line when you said:
“These people used to be called pirates. Now they’re open source enthusiasts.”
Using open source is entirely different that using a commercial product without a license. You may be able to deduce that software pirates use open source software, but that does not mean open source users are software pirates.
I was just talking to a friend about this same thing a few days ago, and we realized something – for some reason, in the software world, we expect things to be free, but we don’t expect it elsewhere. If I go to the grocery store, I don’t expect to get free bananas. I’m willing to pay $100+ every time I go to the grocery store on mostly stuff that I’ll end up forgetting about until it goes bad, but I can’t pay $30 for some software that I could theoretically use forever? What’s wrong with me/us?
“free is also a weakness: it is cheap, mass-produced, and the same for everyone… some people are willing to pay for a premium experience.”
Wow. Do you really believe that free and a ‘premium experience’ are mutually exclusive? You provided your own counterexamples in the form of Eclipse and Firefox.
And you don’t usually troll the open source crowd so heavily.
It’s not the end of the month, you can’t be looking for extra attention to get more ad-hits and help you pay the bills.
All I can think of is that you must’ve been tired when you wrote this or something.
Everybody has off days; just don’t do it too often or you’ll lose readers.
The problem with Jeff’s article is that it suggests tools like PHP and MySQL are free “as in speech”. Except they are not truly free. They seem to be “free” because they rely on technologies provided by companies whose such actions go in line with their commercial, corporate strategies.
PHP relies on the Zend Engine from Zend who sells PHP IDEs; Sun sells the enterprise edition of MySQL so they can afford to provide a “free” community edition. These companies did not give away their technologies/platforms/whatever for “a greater good for humankind,” but because it can extend the market share of their technologies in the commercial markets, and also expand the labour pool of skillsets familiar with their tech which, again, increase the pontentials of their market share.
Then there are Apache and PostgreSQL. No, they do not rely on technologies from commercial corporations, but they still carry a cost. Not a monetary one, but one which I called “a moral cost” - they ask you to donate. Donation of course is voluntary, but if you think so highly of these tools, shouldn’t you do the morally right thing and help them?
It is no wonder that everybody is going open source. Because, like Joel Spolsky said, IT COMPLIMENTS THEIR COMMERCIAL STRATEGY OF SELLING MORE OF THEIR CORE PRODUCTS. Case in point: Adobe open sourced their Flex and AIR platform. Why? because it compliments what they’re trying to sell to you - Flex Builder, and the Eclipse plug-in.
So when Jeff asks how to trump your free competition? Simple. Open source your core platform and sell enterprise versions of your products; because unless the next guy who “shows interest” in your core platform is Microsoft, Sun or Google, your core platform is still pretty much save controlled by you.
Lots of hate in the air. Guess that happens anytime you mention OSS.
I think I would be more inclined to buy software if the licenses weren’t so restrictive. For instance, I bought a copy of Windows XP a few months ago (I use Linux for my main OS) and installed it, and I have since migrated to a new computer. Now, in order to activate Windows again, I apparently have to call Microsoft and tell them I switched computers or something like that (not sure, haven’t done it yet.) The bottom line is, I didn’t have to do this for Linux. I think that if I pay for something, I should be able to reinstall it every time I get a new computer without jumping through hoops.
“Um… people who are complaining about the pirate comment…” Jeez, learn to read between the lines and/or get over your persecution complex."
It’s more plausible to me that one person (Jeff Atwood) wrote something unclearly than many people (myself and others) are all collectively unable to read or suffering from some kind of persecution complex. Given how incredibly common it is to misunderstand the nature of ‘free software’, I think it’s perfectly reasonable to call out the unique aspects of free software licensing.
Pirates steal software
Open source enthusiasts use free software, or pay for commercial software, but will always try a free utility first…
Trying free software only costs time, the paid for alternative is usually impossible to try properly before you buy (and still costs the same time) and once you have paid for it (no matter how little) you feel obliged to use it, so it has to be better than the free alternative
The other objection to paying for software when a free alternative is available is the hassle I have to go through to pay for it, how much information I have to give out, and the amount of spam I get afterwards…
The commercial software I use I paid for because either there was no free alternative, or the free alternative was not suitable, or I am using the free alternative and I am paying for support …
Equating open source software with pirating just show how much people belief in Microsoft FUD. For someone with as much software development as you are, I am surprise and disappointed that such a statement came from you. One decision for using or writing open source software should no way be compare to a software pirate.
Daniel Jakut, current MarsEdit owner and developer, had a great post a few weeks ago after hearing the TWiT crew talk about why some application should be free.
http://www.red-sweater.com/blog/481/it-should-be-free
John Gruber and Gus Mueller also talked about how to price your app to appeal to people.
http://daringfireball.net/2006/11/pinprick
http://gusmueller.com/blog/archives/2006/11/pinprick.html
I think you covered it as well Jeff.
What motive has driven the developer to create the tool you are considering and which developer has motives that more closely aligned with yours?
Commercial developers are motivated by the desire to separate you from your money. They will do what ever they need to do (no more, no less) in order to achieve that goal.
There are many different motives that drive FOSS developers. Some are motivated by a desire to create a tool that will solve a particular problem, some want to be recognized for their creative talents.
When I need to decide between two competing products, I’ll pick the one that was built to solve a problem over the one that was built to pick my pocket.
Amen. Let’s start the cult of CHEAP software, as in, I’d be prepared to spend a little money on something if 1. it was user-friendly, 2. it worked, 3. it gave me some sway with the developer if it doesn’t work as it is supposed to (that is, I’m not just prevailing on some dude who does it as a hobby).
"Free is indeed a competitive advantage. But free is also a weakness: it is cheap, mass-produced, and the same for everyone. "
It was 1986 when Gates wrote a memo to Apple encouraging them to open up their operating system to other computer vendors. The whole idea behind that memo was to make the computing experience cheaper, more open, and more interoperable. It’s this same basic idea of openness that eventually got Microsoft to 96% market share. "cheap, mass-produced, and the same for everyone. " is not an idea that’s unique to free software, even if free software takes openness to an extreme that ‘open systems’ historically have not.
@Elmo Gallen:
If there were always good free bananas sitting next to the regular bananas at the grocery store, we wouldn’t want to pay for bananas either.
Software’s easy to provide for free compared to other goods and services, because once you’ve made it, you can easily distribute as many copies as you want with no or little extra work, and for dirt cheap. Because it’s easy to provide for free, people do it, so there is free software, so we know that we can look for free software, so we don’t want to pay for software.
It’s more plausible to me that one person (Jeff Atwood) wrote something unclearly than many people (myself and others) are all collectively unable to read or suffering from some kind of persecution complex. Given how incredibly common it is to misunderstand the nature of ‘free software’, I think it’s perfectly reasonable to call out the unique aspects of free software licensing.
I dunno, on the internet it’s pretty possible that you’re all suffering a complex and collectively unable to read. There’s a good number of people who were able to read it without a difficulty.
In any case, lighten up, assume a little good faith. Nobody thinks that OS software and piracy are identical, though it’s patently obvious to anyone who has spent any time on the internet that the culture of expecting things for free extends to both, and that these are spheres which do, and have, overlapped in the past and present.
Which are the programs that are better than Beyond Compare now? I’m using WinMerge and WinDiff at the moment but not really happy with either of them. (WinDiff has a terrible UI. WinMerge has a fairly poor diffing engine that sometimes gets confused over simple changes.) Coincidentally I just downloaded Beyond Compare but had not yet tried it out.
I looked at the “comparison of file comparison tools” link but those tables are horrendous and I can’t be bothered filtering out all the meaningless stuff (e.g. I’m only interested in Windows GUI tools so the OS X and Linux and command-line tools just get in the way).
Jeff, You mentioned that one or more tools are now better than BC but you didn’t say which they are. 
As comments that other people made about free and/or open-source software not being at risk of developer neglect: Absolute rubbish. Plenty of free and open source projects have been abandoned. Unless someone is actually willing to put the effort into a project it doesn’t matter whether or not the source is available. I myself and a programmer but I don’t go around fixing/improving other people’s projects very often. I do occasionally but in general I simply don’t have time. I imagine the same is true for most programmers, especially when we’re talking about large projects where it may take you a day just to get the thing to compile and then even longer to get up to speed with all the source and the architecture of the thing.
If software is free (as in no cost) and/or open-source then that’s always a bonus, but IMO a very small one compared to whether the product is actually any good and has good developers actively working on it, something that in my experience is completely orthogonal to the cost or visibility of the source-code. The “thousands of eyes” is a complete myth, IMO, and many of the big open-source projects (like Firefox) are successful because they have dedicated paid developers working on them just like a closed-source project.
(Before anyone jumps on me: I am absolutely not saying that free or open-source makes things worse. I am just saying that I think people overestimate how much they make things better, and other aspects are far more important.)
And a lot of open source software is a still a joke; to refuse to pay for any software ever is ridiculous for a developer. I could use PHP since it’s free, or I could use ASP.Net. If I use PHP, I get something that doesn’t even handle unicode, or I could use ASP.Net and have seperate code and data, built in AJAX, built in internationalization support, etc. It’s not even a contest.
It’s not always true that free is bad, but to always blindly refuse to pay for anything is bigotry that a good developer just can’t afford.
The merge tool that comes with Perforce (P4Merge) is great. It does three way merges to boot and is free. A few people here use SourceGear DiffMerge, also free.
In any case, lighten up, assume a little good faith.
Easier said than done, sometimes. The OSS debate is highly charged, since it touches on core values: the ability to make a living, the ability to share information with others, and the ability to contribute back to society in various ways. Closed source advocates get touchy that the OSS folks are undermining their business. OSS advocates are get touchy about Closed Source advocates questioning their motives, questioning the quality of their software, misunderstanding their agenda, and undermining their ability to be open. In my experience, all of this happens to some extent, so there’s at least some merit to all of these concerns.
There’s little difference between software I paid for and software I didn’t.
I use both Microsoft Office and Open Office, and the only reason I have both is because Open Office works better for me when I have to create structured documents (e.g. it doesn’t insist on default settings that reformat the whole document when I change formatting on one line, or ask that I dig out the setting that turns that off).
Same with file compares (I use the free ExamDiff). I’m not seeing a lot of difference here with the others here.
I’ll pay when it’s worth it. The TX Text control, for example, is so much better than Microsoft’s RichTextBox control that the money I paid for it was a no brainer. Years on, I have no regrets about it.
“And a lot of open source software is a still a joke;”
Agreed. My primary laptop is an Ubuntu machine, and there are still many, many things I prefer about Windows. These issues aren’t issues with software on the margin of OSS, they are issues with the core: Gnome, Nautilus, Open Office, Gnumeric, X.Org, the Linux Kernel.
Of course, that said, I’m still prefer Linux enough not to switch it back to Windows.
The biggest advantage of free software, in my opinion, is not the cost but the lack of licensing hassle. I don’t have to worry about storing, updating and distributing keys etc.