“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.
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.
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.
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.
