We Don't Use Software That Costs Money Here

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. :stuck_out_tongue:

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. :slight_smile:

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. :slight_smile:

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 :slight_smile:

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.

We used to be pirates, but now we’re open source enthusiasts?

Nice. Real nice.