We Don't Use Software That Costs Money Here

“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 :slight_smile:

"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.

but some beer is free…

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Beer

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. :wink:

@ted: 'Cause there are no hobbyists putting together free versions of the thing in question on their own time, I guess. For piracy, sure, I’d ask that question, but we’re talking about getting something equivalent legally and free, not stealing things.

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… :wink:

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?