I would buy more of this little tools if I could put them in my basket at amazon because on most sites the payment processing is clumsy.
"Why does every discussion have to be messy when it touches OSS?"
Passion.
Where do you stop though? If I bought the ‘best’ tool for the job for every little thing that I need to do on my computer I would be forking out a small fortune.
“MySQL (is) still a toy database”
I suppose if you were running a huge database then it might start to struggle… but the majority of the millions of databases out there aren’t huge - for them it is an excellent choice.
If you need some weeding done in your garden, do you hire the world’s leading landscape gardener, or do you do it yourself? Answer: you do it yourself, and save thousands of pounds (or dollars) in the process. The landscape gardener may well do a better job, but for what it’s worth, the difference is negligible. It’s a simple case of using the right tool for the job.
@mix lagua No, we are not all linux enthusiats, i find linux is the biggest piece of crap which was aver developed.
Expresso is my choice for regular expression stuff. And it’s free (but I would pay for it).
@Trevor: “If a project is earning money there’s no reason it will become abandonware.”
Not necessarily true. Public corporations with multiple products have a legal obligation to maximize return for their shareholders, which is not necessarily the same as maximizing the return from a single product. My first commercial project out of school suffered this fate. Our group was profitable, but we didn’t align with the strategic interests of the company. We were disbanded and the resources redeployed to where they were more likely to be useful to the corporation as a whole.
VB6, I’ve said it before in this thread, is another example of a profitible product that was discontinued by the vendor.
@Alan: “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”
The other side to this question is why should these small companies necessarily be able to make money selling something that’s apparently pretty well known how to create? OSS, almost by definition, isn’t rocket science or even very innovative, so unless your commercial entity can add value over that, you probably should have trouble selling your product.
Chill out people. Have a (possibly free) beer. 
Why does every discussion have to be messy when it touches OSS? Let’s be a bit more pragmatic here. Computer everything that runs on it are just tools. I don’t care if a tool is free or not. All I care about is its merit function, ie. what I get (money, productivity, satisfaction etc.) minus what I have to give (money, time, energy etc.), within legal limit that is. That’s why I use both to my advantage.
On the production side, I’m coding commercial software, but I’m giving a serious thought about pursuing another business model using OSS too.
I don’t mind doing both. I don’t mind at all.
For me its not about free as in cost, its about the freedom as in freedom of choice. Companies that create software for sale should be allowed to do so without being marginalized, same for us that choose to use “free software”. The free as in cost, is just a side effect of the sharing culture of OSS, but in some way we all contribute either by way of writing directly the software or somewhere else in the stack. Some folk Beta test others promote and some help out with “tech support” by way of mailing lists. others writer to refute FUD and diatribe.
Join the revolution and give something away.
Thanks Darrin
@Paulus: “Why does every discussion have to be messy when it touches OSS?”
It’s not necessarily bad if it’s messy, just messy. Constructive debate on the relative merits of OSS and Closed Source is a good thing, and as important as the software itself, if not moreso.
@Jonas: ‘Free! “I don’t think that word means what you think it means.”’
Here’s a word you don’t seem to know the meaning of: Homonym.
@ mschaef: ‘VB6, I’ve said it before in this thread, is another example of a profitible product that was discontinued by the vendor.’ ‘See VB6 and Windows XP, among many others. Abandonment is not unique to OSS.’
VB6 and XP are pretty terrible examples of “discontiuned” products. What are VB.Net and Vista?
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
That is exactly the point though! When Jeff concentrates on the up-front purchase of Free Software, like that’s all it has going for it, he totally misapprehends the situation. That’s not why people use it so much.
The rest of the article was about trying to make your proprietary software good enough to compete against Free Software. If you don’t really understand the appeal of your competition, you fail Sun Tsu’s first imperitive of war: knowing your enemy.
Hard not to read this with cynical eyes, after yesterday’s unfortunate post calling OSS enthusiasts ex-pirates.
Still, congratulations, 5000 is no small money. I wish more of the .NET developer supported (hell, at least understood) what the open source movement is about.
@Leo Davidson: “VB6 and XP are pretty terrible examples of “discontiuned” products. What are VB.Net and Vista?”
Have you ever tried to port between VB6 and VB.Net? There are porting tools and superficial similarities, but they are really quite different languages. Among many other differences, VB.Net now defaults to requiring explicit variable declarations. This can be turned off, but the semantics you get from doing so are different than in VB6. A port to VB.Net is effectively a complete rewrite, and that assumes you can find .Net equivalents to any third party components you were using in VB6.
So, effectively speaking, there is still a product called Visual Basic, but it’s close to the same as being a totally different. This also applies to VBA too. VBA is falling increasingly into the same category as the old pre-excel-5 macro language. It’s still supported, but unchanging, in favor of Microsoft’s current corporate strategy, which is .Net based automation.
The XP/Vista scenario is similar. I’ve worked for several Fortune 500 clients recently that are still on Windows 2000, much less XP or Vista. You can argue that they should stay with the times and upgrade, but when you have 200,000 seats to upgrade, this is a costly thing to do, both in terms of time and in money. For companies that large, you can probably get special treatement from Microsoft, but the same issues apply at any scale, including companies small enough not to appear on Microsoft’s radar. They’re still faced with the cost of an upgrade, and no compelling reason to upgrade, aside from the fact that Microsoft wants them to. Which, of course, they do, since it means more money towards the Microsoft top line.
All of these examples have one thing in common: an initial investment in Microsoft (Closed Source) technology, followed by Microsoft making decisions in their own interest, decisions that force their clients to pay more money to upgrade. If there were really compelling reasons (ie: it’ll make me more profitable) to go from 2000 to Vista or VB6 to .Net, then maybe it’d make sense to upgrade. However, for the 99% of the world that doesn’t care about the relative merits of strong typing, explicit variable declarations, and GDI, GDI+, and WPF, all of these upgrades are just a tedious and expensive pain in the ass. OSS, by virtue of the fact that it’s open, at least provides an alternative to continually having to pay Microsoft, just because they feel like you owe them.
I totally get this. I love Ultra-Edit for it’s column editing, but use Crimson Edit because it’s free. I have no idea why I spent several hours scouring for a free text editor with Ultra-Edit’s column editing feature to come up with nothing. (I still believe something exists)
BTW, The best free diff tool is SourceGear’s Diffmerge. 
A great alternative for regex testing is expresso, its free and it rocks:)
www.ultrapico.com/Expresso.htm
Also winmerge is a very good app, every time I get a new version of it they have added something cool.
I find it amusing that developers who make software for a living are the stingiest about paying for it. I guess, in some way working in a business numbs you to the value of the product or service you are offering. I suppose the farm worker who picks apples for a living probably couldn’t stomach the idea of paying for an apple either since he is surrounded by them all day.
@JohnFX: "I find it amusing that developers who make software for a living are the stingiest about paying for it. "
Developers are just the sort of people who best recognize how transient most software is, which I’m sure diminishes perceived value.
"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."
Run, study, and modify? maybe. Distribute? now you are talking about free as in beer. Because the freedom to distribute would essentially put a closed source vendor out of business.
The word “piracy” has been re-defined. Why can’t people just accept it?
“Software that does not give the user freedom is this way is uncooperative and unhelpful to those wishing to live in a free society.”
You mean like 1% of the population? Most people and businesses do not care about the fact that they can bring their software for updates to anyone (which doesn’t work very well when you aren’t so tech savvy).
The general population wants to buy software, not have to touch the code, and get support from the people that sold it to them.
“The Free Software Foundation is one such organisation that seeks to educate the public about the issues of software freedom.”
They are a zealous foundation that seeks to push their neo-socialistic agenda on the Internet population. It has little to do with freedom.
Nice post
These problem tormented me for a long time and I finally succeeded to crystallize all my thought into a single post on my blog.
http://alexaboutsoftware.com/you-are-coder-so-who-is-taking-your-money
I tried to explain the consequences of open source for a coder and for a company.
Basically it might turn up to be bad for developers (read geeks) and good for a company