> The plain truth is that developers expect to get their tools free of charge.
This is an accurate, but damning indictment of how some of the most highly paid workers on the planet won't pay for tools. Unlike nearly every other profession.
Folks, if you can afford it, please pay for quality software, instead of relying on FAANG and VC money to keep the tools going!
The highest quality tools in the software development space tend to be FOSS, because unlike any other field, we are employed in the field that makes the tools our field uses, and distribution and manufacturing costs are zero.
People build tools that they want to use, then share it with others because it's free to. If the rest of the economy worked like this we would be in full-blown utopia.
Selling software to software developers is always going to have a pretty low ceiling, because you're always going to be competing with "I could build this myself" while dealing with a bunch of users who will have the nagging thought of "Why the heck does this bug exist/this feature not exist? I could fix this in an afternoon." Ironically, open source relieves this pressure for multiple orders of magnitude more people than actually contribute, because they're only grappling with their own laziness, rather than resenting you, the developer.
> The highest quality tools in the software development space tend to be FOSS
> People build tools that they want to use, then share it with others because it's free to
This maybe sounds true on the surface, but isn't really? Prior to VSCode, Visual Studio was the most-used editor by professional developers for a very long time, with Sublime Text and Jetbrains' IDEs being close behind, and the paid options are still among the most popular. While VSCode is wildly successful, and has completely unprecedented adoption rates, it was not borne out of people "building tools because they want to, then sharing it because it's free", but is rather the result of Microsoft's calculated gamble that open-source would give them more ecosystem capture and useful data through telemetry in the long run.
> Selling software to software developers is always going to have a pretty low ceiling, because you're always going to be competing with "I could build this myself"
This shouldn't really be true if software developers would think rationally about tools for three seconds. I believe the US median compensation for developers is approaching $200k? Any tool that saves a single hour of productivity is likely paying for itself, maybe two or three for the more expensive ones. Something that saves 40 hours of productivity is basically worth its weight in gold. You might be able to say "I can build this myself", but can you build it yourself in 1 hour? 40 hours? For most software, it would still take even longer than that. If you are a paid professional, and value your own time anywhere near what your employer does (I personally value my time more than any employer ever did), you should be extremely grateful for any opportunity to spend trivial sums of money in a way that allows you to reclaim hours to use in other ways.
I've been programming since ~1999 and anecdataly don't remember programmers having a culture of paying for their dev tools. On linux everything's free, and on windows I've used a plethora of freeware IDEs/compilers/etc. from turbo pascal, dev c++ (that's the name of it), later on eclipse took the stage in it's buggy mess and right before vscode there was atom. The only people that I know that used visual studio either got it for free for being a student/teacher, had their job pay for it, or most commonly: pirated it.
According to this[1] site visual studio had a 35.6% marketshare, tied at #1 with notepad++.
Yes, I'm aware. That's the problem elucidated in the article. Developers expect everything for free, even though the price of tools relative to what they get paid to deliver products using those tools is completely trivial. This reluctance to pay for anything harms developers themselves most of all. If developers normalized a culture of paying for things they use, more developers would be able to develop their own independent software and sustain themselves without being beholden to $awful_corp_environment to pay the bills. But because developers will do anything they can to avoid paying <1 hr salary for a tool that saves them many hours, there is a huge gap between corporate professionals, who make lots of money, and open-source developers, most of whom make almost nothing, with only a relatively limited subset of independent developers able to bridge the gap and make a living producing good, non-corporate-nightmare software.
I'm pretty pro-piracy for students and such. It is an extremely good thing for learning to be as available as possible, even to those in poverty, so that they can make something better of their situation and contribute more to society than if they were locked in to low-knowledge careers solely by virtue of the random chance of their upbringing. But people who make a living off software development never graduate from the mindset of piracy. Even for open-source software, the vast majority of users never contribute to funding those projects they rely on. If we think open-source software is good for the world, why are we so opposed to anyone being able to make a living creating it? The world's corporate capture by non-free software is a direct result of our own collective actions in refusing to pay anything for anything even when we can afford to.
Well, I've been programming since 1986 and I had to buy all the compilers I used. For the Mac: Lightspeed Pascal, Lightspeed C and Metrowerks. I wish I had the money to buy MPW. Linux then was just a glint in Linus's eyes. We didn't have the internet with easy access to pirated software. I didn't do BB's so I don't know about that area. Once I went to uni in the 90's I started using Usenet but even then I didn't download any pirated software. Microsoft was virtually giving away Visual Studio/Visual Basic to University students. Back then I also remember reading Linus' arguments with Tanenbaum over microkernels and this funny language called Python and its creator unveiling/supporting it on Usenet. Around that time more and more tools were being offered for free and as a poor student I was delighted. Also we got access to free Unix tools since as we were doing work on Unix systems. Oh yeah, I remembered using this cool functional language called Miranda in one of my courses but was sad that it was a paid product. And then I heard about the debut of Haskell which was sort of a free answer to Miranda.
I remember paying something like $400-500 for Glockenspiel C++ for MS-DOS, which was based on AT&T's cfront and compiled to C code. Not long after that, Turbo C++ and Zortech C++ made things a lot easier, since they didn't compile through C, like cfront did. Those were in the $150-200 range, iirc. I also remember paying for PC-YACC from Abraxas, something like $400.
It did have a remarkably low price, though - less than a tenth of UCSD p-System or Topspeed. Even the competitors in the hobbyist space like the original IBM/Microsoft Pascal and DRI's Pascal/MT originally cost 4-5x as much.
Really, it was responsible for as big a step change in pricing of programming tools in the 1980s as GNU, BSD, and Linux were in the 90s.
Back in ye olden days, prior to teh interwebs, compilers were not free and it was an assumed price of entry to programming. Pirating has always been a thing, but I've paid for more than one compiler in my life and I wasn't exactly flush with cash.
I believe that there is a difference between developers as persons and developers as employees.
As a person, I don't think that I am very likely to pay for the tool I use to develop in my free time.
As an employee, I need to convince my company to pay for the tool. If it is a subscription, that's even worse. So well-known ones like Microsoft tools might already be approved, but for not-so-famous ones, it's harder.
If I want to depend on a third-party library/tool, I need to convince my company that the licence is fine, that the security is fine, and if it's not free I need to convince them to pay for it.
As a hobbyist programmer I make precisely zero dollars a year so paying for my tools only makes sense if they increase my nonmonetary enjoyment. As an employee I have very little power to convince my company to buy a certain tool and I tend to prefer the tools I‘m already familiar with from my hobby.
Equipment for any real life hobby costs money, and people are willing to pay for good equipment. Why is software so different? FOSS has made us so resistant to paying for good software. I'm not saying software has to be expensive, even $20 per major version could make a burgeoning indie industry thrive.
Back when MSDN subscriptions where a thing and people still used Visual Studio, the tools were a lot better. Debuggers worked and did impressive things (time travel debugging! Rewind your entire program state! Step through from your website code all the way to your database queries within the same debugging session! Easily debug remote servers!). Developer documentation was professionally written and edited.
Now everything is free and we get what we pay for.
> People build tools that they want to use, then share it with others because it's free to. If the rest of the economy worked like this we would be in full-blown utopia.
But the rest of the economy doesn't work like this, so support your OSS projects financially.
Very true. On immich, I've always wanted a way to do certain operations locally like adding to an album before the photo/video is fully uploaded, but I'm not frustrated that it's not possible because if I cared enough I'd create a pull request. For features that Google Photos is/was missing, I'm not as generous.
The thing is that one software is easy to crack and copy, so it is cheap...but a lot of softwares to work together is not, so that's why we have SaaS and PaaS today.
To clarify, I used "manufacturing" there, as opposed to R&D, to differentiate from physical stuff. Software costs lots to develop, but nothing to make a second copy of.
> People build tools that they want to use, then share it with others because it's free to. If the rest of the economy worked like this we would be in full-blown utopia.
Post-AGI economics seems to bring cost of production and distribution very close to zero, so this may soon come to pass. Culture might need a minute to catch up though!
> Post-AGI economics seems to bring cost of production and distribution very close to zero, so this may soon come to pass. Culture might need a minute to catch up though!
No. The fact that you built something yourself doesn't make it free to produce.
More over, you __won't__. You simply cannot build all of the things that you could buy at scale. What if you had to write all of your own video games? Or operating systems?
I assumed that they meant "cost of production", since that's what you give to keep your money, so that includes 0->1. But if what they meant is what you said then I'd say that the cost of 0->1 is not somehow less important. Software does make 1->100 much more accessible though, so, in that way, you have an opportunity to help out very small businesses in a way that you can't in other industries, which is even more of a reason to buy code from your peers, IMO.
I think the comparison to other industries is that while they pay for tools, it's not the inventor of the hammer that gets paid, but the producer of the unit, which in software is ~0. I'm not arguing against paying/donating to FOSS, but I do support the discrete distinction to physical tools.
If the tool is saving you a large chunk of time, then why does it matter what's happening in another industry? We seem to be losing a really simple thread here: Pay for things because they present more value to you than you're giving away in payment.
Y'all seem to have some notion of what constitutes "fair" payment that you're so attached to that you're willing to shoot yourselves in the foot.
Definition one on Merriam Webster is, "To make into a product suitable for use." This is what I thought you meant, because cost of production is what it costs to forego buying something. IMO, that's the cost you really want to consider.
The fewer proprietary abandonwares are in my dependencies the more I can actually do things. It's less about the price and more about the freedom.
From the link:
> Beyond pricing, there’s a deeper concern about durability. Developers are understandably wary of building their entire app strategy on a small company’s paid, closed-source tool.
If it's GPL, it's not really source-available anymore. The dual licensing thing is more to give big companies a cheaper way out than bothering their lawyers.
Me personally, I treat source-available roughly the same as proprietary. I fix bugs in other people's code as suits my needs, and source-available is just hostile to the whole idea of anyone else touching the source.
Personally, probably not, although I would be more likely to than if I couldn't access the source.
I just don't have a good history with software created and sold by a company. Their incentives rarely seem aligned with mine, and I have had too many rug-pulls to fall for it again.
Companies that start out with sensible and open policies too often struggle to make money, and then end up trying to pull back on their openness and suddenly important bits aren't able to be modified or controlled by the user anymore.
> Would you pay for source-available products? GPL and paid license?
I'm not GP but I would at least consider it. I say that as someone who refuses to build on closed-source tooling or libraries. I'd even consider closed-source if there was an irrevocable guarantee that the source would be released in its entirety (with a favorable open source license) if the license/pricing terms ever changed or the company ceased to exist or stopped supporting that product.
> Along with a guarantee that you get to keep access to older versions (Jetbrains and Sublime Text models)?
I like that for personal tools but I wouldn't build my products or business on top of those. I've had too much trouble getting old binaries to work on new OS versions to consider these binaries to be usable in the long term.
That's because open source tools are way better for software developers.
I find quirks or bugs or limitations in my tools all the time, and when they are open source I can fix and augment the tools however I want, and I can share those changes with others.
I can't do that for closed source software.
Now, for most software users it doesn't really matter because they couldn't fix a bug or add a feature anyway. Closed and open source are functionally equivalent, and it makes more sense to pay for support and not care you can't change it yourself.
I think this is kind of like cars; people who work on cars want to buy a car that doesn't have a bunch of electronic and proprietary parts that can't be worked on in their garage. On the other hand, people who won't work on their car anyway don't care.
Software tools are not really tools like a knife. They are more like cooking recipes.
Traditionally, people don't pay for cooking recipes, they may pay for cookbooks, that is a nice packaging around the recipes, or they may keep their recipes secret. Cooking recipes are like the software tools of chefs.
The actual tools of developers are computers, which they pay for, like chefs pay for their knives.
Software tools, like recipes cost nothing to copy and distribute, while actual tools, like knives and computers cost money per unit to produce.
To be completely fair, this becomes significantly less mystifying when you trace back the origins of the free software movement...
edit: To be a bit less opaque, a relevant quote:
> In the late 1970s, Richard Stallman had an issue with a new printer installed in the MIT AI Lab, where he worked at the time, which ran proprietary firmware. Richard Stallman was frustrated that he could not receive a copy of the printer software and edit the code to solve his problem. This early experience made him realize limits of non-free software was a social issue.
Importantly: it was never about cost. It was about the rights of users of software. It's just that the particular rights that GNU was concerned with also makes it challenging to have a moat on monetizing the resulting software.
> Importantly: it was never about cost. It was about the rights of users of software.
The cost (free) got me looking, but the rights, now that's what kept me.
Costs - being a poor student meant I was not ever in a position to pay for products (even those massively subsidised by companies like Microsoft) - there was no way I could buy an IDE, or a compiler, or anything that I needed to /learn/.
Rights - once I had the products, I was able to see how they worked, and, more importantly, make changes that worked for me, and, if desired, share those changes so other people could take advantage of them. None of that was possible under the other licences.
On the other hand, we're the only high paid workers that provide so much work for free through open source. Sure, there's lawyers and doctors that do the occasional pro bono, nut nothing on the scale you find in software development.
At previous companies, I was more than happy to use corporate money to pay for software I believed in. Tools like Hashicorp Vault were certainly worth paying for the Enterprise tier. What stopped me was climbing over huge bureaucratic hurdles cause someone at the company already spent millions on CyberArk which no one wanted to use and convincing anyone to spend a few thousand on anything else was out of the question. It’s not that devs don’t want to pay for it.
This is a wrong framing. I don't want to depend on anything fundamental that would be limited by my ability to pay. The problem is not the money, but the enforcement, the licensing. It usually implies closed source, problems provisioning (a separate license for CI/CD?), and ultimately stuff like hardware crypto keys and online checks.
This is acceptable for highly specialized software with hundreds or even dozens of installations (like some mega-CAD systems). It should rather not be the case for smaller-time, widespread tools. It just doesn't work well, like the maker of Skip noticed. It stunts the development of the tool, making it impossible to meaningfully contribute.
With that, I'm all for paying open-source developers: via donations, sponsorships, hiring them for contract work, or full-time. I'd like this to be a socially accepted norm, expected behavior for corporations, but not a legally enforced requirement.
> some of the most highly paid workers on the planet won't pay for tools
Aren't we in the middle of literally the entire industry adopting 200/mo AI subscriptions? It seems to me like engineers will absolutely pay for tools if they justify their value.
It's less a binary pay/no pay, and more the value of accessing the dev tools. If you consider the fact that AI companies are most likely losing money running the models, then AI tools are incredibly cheap - they're in some ways paying you to use it.
No model maker is going to try to generate a profit off users using their models, they're gonna try to generate it some other way - much like dev tools.
OP was saying "no one pays for tools", but AI tools are a clear counterexample. That the AI tools are themselves not profitable isn't part of the argument - "no one pays for tools which are profitable" is not an argument that anyone was making.
But, as the article points out, developers do pay for the tools indirectly - "First-party IDEs like Xcode and Android Studio, popular integration frameworks, and essential dev tools are all given away at no (direct) cost. The platform vendors monetize through developer program fees, app store commissions, and cloud services. Framework providers typically monetize through complementary services."
And note that the article points out two other hurdles / drawbacks to adoption - their product required a subscription and developers are unwilling to commit to product from a small company that they fear may go under.
What money do you think pays for most of the development of the Linux kernel? I assure you, it is not the altruistic goodwill of people around the world.
How do you think did development of Linux work for the first many years until corporations saw the value Linux is providing? (and developers demanded they use their favorite operating system)
I've paid for tools in the past, but I think there's a difference, the value of a lot of our tools isn't that great, but more importantly, there is a huge cost to adoption. Going in blind on a paid tool, putting in the time to learn and train yourself to use it, that's a high cost for something that you need to pay for entry and recurring after, that maybe 50 hours into it you start to realize you don't like it.
When I've paid for tools, it tends to be a tool that was free for me to start using, that is now part of my workflow and I love, and I am worried it won't continue to be maintained or updated so I pay for it.
Engineers are happy to pay for tools (hello, Claude Code). Libraries are quite different and it's a little uncomfortable to build a business on a closed-source, proprietary library.
Paying for things that aren't worth it is noble, but not good economics in the long run. If people want to buy a tool not for what it produces but for the story it tells, this is fine. But just like startups need product-market fit, tools also need product-market fit, and if no one is buying, it could simply be that the alternatives are suitable replacements.
It's not that I don't want to pay for good tools. I don't want to invest time and effort into tools that I have to pay for.
If a tool requires payment, someone is gatekeeping access to that tool. Even if prices and terms seem reasonable today, there's no guarantee that they will be in the future.
Paid tools are in my experience much more likely to engage in practices that make them less useful or more frustrating for me, like:
- repeatedly changing UIs in often deleterious ways
- wasting my/CPU time on analytics and engagement
- upselling tactics
- focusing on making the most money, not providing the best tool
- preventing or making difficult the use of old versions
- reducing customization for the sake of reducing customer support or branding
- preventing me from making minor tweaks to code that would improve or fix something
The last paragraph is so accurate. Thanks. Just a small note: Developers, add your photo (mug shot) to your code, you receive more money. People do business with people.
In some book about behavioral economy there was a test with people in company kitchenette.
Above the coffee machine, there was a sign asking people who drink coffee at work to contribute to a jar for the next cpurchase. One sign was just text, while the other was also made with eyes. The one with eyes raised more money.
> This is an accurate, but damning indictment of how some of the most highly paid workers on the planet won't pay for tools. Unlike nearly every other profession.
This is just plain false. The total software and SaaS tool spend at every company I’ve worked for in the past decade has been incredibly high.
Developers also commonly bring their own paid tools when it’s allowed: JetBrains is common. Many people have paid Git GUIs or merge tools.
I think the hard truth is that getting adoption on a new paid tool is really hard, especially when you’re not sure if it’s even going to be around in a couple years.
When there are open source alternatives it’s usually not about cost. We’d happily pay for something that was higher quality and helped us develop faster if it didn’t come with its own set of risks. The difference is that OSS is something we can pick up and carry along with the community even if the maintainers go a different direction. We don’t have to worry about sudden license price increases or unfavorable terms appearing at renewal time, which happens constantly now.
The mechanics I’ve know all had to buy their own tools. That may be different if you’re at a specialist shop, like a place that only fixes specific parts expensive makes of cars. The guy at the local auto shop fixing whatever drives in that day almost certainly had to buy all of his.
It's not simply that developers expect to get their tools for free.
So many developers have seen the rug-pulls and exploitation of non-free tools. Build on Oracle and your company will need to hire more lawyers than developers. Even in less-exploitive situations, we've seen a lot of situations where things become many times more expensive. Google AppEngine moved from charging based on usage to charging based on instance hours and some people saw their bills go up 10x. We saw the Unity price increase which proposed a runtime-install fee. We don't want to build off an ecosystem where we have no idea what the pricing will be going forward. We don't live in a world where we can just remain on an old version via a perpetual license. Security vulnerabilities will require upgrading at whatever price a vendor sets for the new version. Incompatibilities with changing environments (like iOS/Android upgrades) will mean having to pay for upgrades at whatever the new price is.
We've seen so many proprietary dead-ends where we invest a lot of time and money into a platform and then poof it's gone. You don't want to have 10 devs spend a couple years building with a tool that just disappears on you. Something small like Skip could easily run out of funding. This gives you a chicken-and-egg problem: you can't be proprietary unless you're huge, but you basically can't get huge at this point unless you're open source because no one will choose you. Skip was ejectable. It was generating Kotlin so you could just start developing two separate codebases in the future, but if you want a cross-platform toolkit and you're worried about a dead-end, you're just going to choose Flutter or React Native or something.
We also don't want a situation where devs are waiting on a vendor. With open source, I can go in and fix something at my company and put in a PR. Even if the PR doesn't get accepted for a while, we aren't stuck.
And it's not just developers. If I'm working at a company and I want to use a paid tool, I'm going to need to get approval for that which can just be a pain. Higher ups are going to want to know that we aren't going to get a rug-pull in the future. Skip was $1,000/year per developer, but that could change in the following year. Companies have gotten rich by offering you a good deal, locking you into their ecosystem, and then raising prices. Higher ups are going to want answers that don't really exist.
Finally, it's hard to know whether something is any good without putting a decent amount of time into it. We often learn things because they're free toys we can play with. I make something fun in my spare time with a free tool and I've learned something new. But I don't want to do that with something proprietary where I might have to deal with licensing. Yes, sometimes there's exceptions for non-commercial use, but sometimes the line is blurry on that - what if I have a tip jar. We don't want to deal with that.
A development kit like Skip isn't a hammer. A hammer will continue to be a hammer even if the company goes out of business. When we're choosing tools, we're not just making a bet on what it is, but also what it will be in the future. If it's going to become abandoned in the future, it'll be a lot less useful. When you're comparing tools at a hardware store, you might not make the best choice, but you aren't going to find out 18 months later that your hammer is incompatible with all nails going forward. You're also generally only out the price of the hammer, not out the price of the hammer plus 18 months worth of work that you need to redo.
Completely agree with you. I skip most of the new tools that come out, because the ones I use already work well for me, and the probability of the new tool disappearing fast is high.
Learning a new tool is a mental effort that makes sense for the seller to propose, but doesn't for me. My mental energy is better spent on my loved ones. It has to be truly revolutionary for me to invest time into it, like the LLM stuff. But otherwise I've been happy with Bash, Vim, JetBrains products and Terraform for a very long while. I don't see any need to change that.
I can't find a solid source to link to but the few I found shows that IT and Healthcare tops per employee spend on SaaS. The reality is nobody wants to spend for SaaS.
I’ve paid for a few things for work, but I’m always living a bit outside of corporate rules when I do that. This makes it hard for me to justify if it’s only for work. In other cases, the licensing of the product doesn’t allow me to bring my personal license to work.
I’ve paid for 2 text editors, that I used personally, but also took it to work. Now I use VS Code, because the company essentially mandated it with the way they rolled out GitHub Copilot and wanted to see metrics on it. This pushed me to VSCodium at home, so I don’t have to live 2 different worlds.
I paid for the font I use in my editor, I assume that’s not something that will get flagged.
Transmit (from Panic) and Kagi are the other two things I’m using at work with my personal account. I keep waiting for them to randomly stop working one day.
Getting an actual license for software through work, that isn’t already approved, requires so much bureaucracy and red tape; I don’t even know where to begin.
I sometimes daydream about working for myself or a small company, where I can use whatever I want.
I will never pay for anything intellij again. Not because I don't have the money, not because I prefer everything free like a happy little munchkin, but because I loathe them for creating the best IDE for ruby and keeping it paywalled for 10+ years despite java/kotlin and python editors having community versions. IMO it basically killed the language. Now that ruby is uncommon, they released a community edition like a joke.
I agree. When people bemoan the death of lisp machines and RAD and whatnot, remember that we deserve it. We do not want to invest in good tools and treat "Worse is Better" as some twisted virtue, and then wonder why everything sucks and most developer experience is stuck in 80s-90s technology paradigm. We deserve this.
> We do not want to invest in good tools and treat "Worse is Better" as some twisted virtue, and then wonder why everything sucks and most developer experience is stuck in 80s-90s technology paradigm. We deserve this.
Not terribly surprising that one of the most true comments is at the bottom. The Stockholm syndrome by devs desperately wanting to believe that bad tools are good is insane.
It's not even hard to see why Worse is Better is just worse - among many other tests, you can look at the number of production-grade systems and popular tools written in Perl (virtually non-existent) and bash (literally zero). Empirical evidence strongly contradicts the core value tenets of the ideology.
Yeah, the downvotes were expected. Developers do not like being called out for the miserly and self-destructive bunch that we are.
I was building an advance IDE for C and gave up when I realised that no one would buy it because "lol vim is free". Finally, I am gathering the strength to resume working on it, but only for personal use and with no expectation of selling more than 100 copies.
What bothers me the most is the hypocrisy. It's okay to make money by showing predatory ads to unsuspecting populace, but not by selling useful tools. No, that is immoral.
> damning indictment of how some of the most highly paid workers on the planet won't pay for tools
I'm gonna pay for work. I'm not gonna pay for copy of some bytes. Especially not because lawyers say so.
Figure out a business model that doesn't require you to put a policeman behind my back to make it work. It's not that hard. Steam has one. GOG has one.
This is an accurate, but damning indictment of how some of the most highly paid workers on the planet won't pay for tools. Unlike nearly every other profession.
Folks, if you can afford it, please pay for quality software, instead of relying on FAANG and VC money to keep the tools going!