[BjoernKW]

If you use Sublime Text instead of the countless quite usable - if perhaps not as good - text editors out there chances are you use it professionally.

For someone using such a tool professionally and earning good money while doing so $80 already is a ridiculously low price.

There are professionals though who for reasons I never quite seemed to understand aren't willing to pay for the tools they use. Absurdly enough this habit is particularly common with developers and companies making money by selling software.

To them 60 USD less wouldn't make a difference. They would never buy the product anyway. So, lowering the price doesn't make any sense at all.

This particular example is just one instance of a more general, widespread fallacy in the software industry: Because software can essentially be copied and reproduced for free people seem to think that the tools used for creating that software have to be available for free as well (many open source tools indeed coming for free doesn't exactly help in this case either).

Many organisations have no qualms with wasting a huge amount of employee time on meetings or on engineers being less productive because they use inadequate or sub-par tools. Yet at the same time the same organisations often tend to make a huge fuss about buying tools that cost a tiny fraction of that waste of time while helping with eliminating that waste.

[Kepler-431c]

It's basically force-of-habit. Many of us grew up in the "windows era" where piracy was just the thing that was done.

It takes posts such as yours to get people to snap out of it.

[PaulHoule]

https://blog.codinghorror.com/we-dont-use-software-that-cost...

In the Windows culture there is also the MSDN factor where once you get an MSDN subscription you have licenses for an insane number of Microsoft product so your SQL Server and Visual Studio and ... are all covered under one price. You are paying for it, but not for an application at a time, so why go with some vendor that wants more money?

[tedmiston]

And for students, MSDNAA covers it all (except Office) for free.