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by wruza 1910 days ago
happier working for the enterprise overlords, where such tools are common

Which tools brought the most of happiness (or convenience), and how’d you rank them among other, free or “cheap saas” tools?

1 comments

Visual Studio Professional/Enterprise, Delphi/C++ Builder, Qt, Oracle, SQL Server, Informix, Enterprise Architect, Windows Professional, macOS, Tableau, Aix, HP-UX, Solaris, Turbo Pascal, Turbo C++, Sublime Text, jAlbum.

Regular donations, Notepad++, Eclipse, Thunderbird, Firefox, VLC, Ubuntu.

Thanks! But honestly I used most of them and expected some life changers instead. Borland’s VCL was the one indeed, but now it’s gone.

The issue with paying for all of that is that as a developer, I simply don’t need it for that price. If the world of FOSS suddenly became expensive, we’d just rewrite few tools from scratch, cause it’s not so hard. It only takes few man-years to implement a decent scripting language with ui toolkit and then you have a world of developers who, like you, do not understand what’s in these 10gb monsters that cost $$$$/year that cannot be done with that FreeLang+FreeUI+FreePackageManager+FreeEtcEtc. FOSS and Enterprise are not competitors, these are natural ways of developers life and of enterprise life.

The way I see it people producing tools are developers as well, and they need to put food on the table.
I agree, and then they set up a price. Piracy is especially bad when you’re pirating from a particular person.

But not all developers have that “I made it and I will charge them the maximum equilibrium out of it” mindset. That’s where “free” part of FOSS began. Do you think that it’s unfair to use things which someone published for everyone to use?

Depends, only when accepting to be paid exactly the same way.

What I don't agree is the expectation to be paid, while refusing to pay other developers for their work.

Even the gratis stuff I use, back in the early FOSS days I bought CDs and magazines that distributed the software, the few times I went to FOSDEM the full volunteer package, nowadays books written by community members and occasional donations on stuff I use regularly.

So it is just not empty words about what is right.