I'm down with paying for tools when creating value, not when learning. We probably even agree. I do not expect many experts to appear at my doorstep if the tool is proprietary. SAP was an example of that.
I'm fine to pay for tools (and I do). But I hate the idea of becoming dependent on proprietary tools. Imagine leaving your job and going to the next and because they don't pay for a tool you've become critically dependent on half your skills are useless.
And its not just for myself but I think its harmful that it creates barriers within teams and organisations. All the investment in infrastructure and knowledge connected to the tooling can only be shared with the people licensed to use it. If your team processes depend on it then nobody outside the team can even properly work on the software.
So we end up in a catch 22 where I will say, we can pay for software as long it is still perfectly practical to develop our code without it. But if you extrapolate from that, it means nothing we ever pay for can have a very high value proposition, and ergo we can't justify paying for it.
If someone suggests a tool that costs $1k/yr over a free tool that costs $5k/year in extra work, I’m going to die on the free tool hill. Because the $1k/yr tool will disappear when the company goes defunct, or it won’t interoperate with something else and there is no way of fixing it. Or it can’t migrate to the next tool. Or we need to upgrade to an enterprise license because we become 21 developers instead of 20. Or they just bump
the cost to
$20k for whatever reason. Or the tool won’t work on CI servers because it only works after entering a key in an attended install (yes this is still a thing).
Free tools have a predictable and stable cost.
I have probably been burned more times from free tools over the years, but the scars aren’t as deep. It’s just a shrug and hoping the other project works when the first doesn’t.
> If your team is using their tools daily since years, and you decide to change to a different one just to avoid a small license fee, that feels hypocritical
From engineer's perspective the difference between a free tool and a "small fee" (in most companies) is not money. It's the fact that you now have to jump through provisioning hoops and ask for permission to use the tool. The difference in flexibility is enormous.
This is not not paying for tools. A lot of people pay, say, for JetBrains IDEs.
This is more about a critical piece that you want to be always, universally available and known through and through. Choosing a non-FOSS option for a critical piece is now rare, and only works for things which were on the market for ages, and are guaranteed to not go away, such as MS Excel.
I think this is a sad reminder that as a developer just because you add value, doesnt mean you will be able to capture it. There is a tragedy of commons at play for tools, most of us (including companies) are unwilling to pay good money for good tools.
A human's birthright is to learn from and improve their tools. Making software proprietary demotes a tool to an appliance we can only interact with in prescribed ways as mere consumers, a role which is beneath us. It severely limits the benefits society derives from your work, and I believe it also harms the customers through learned helplessness. Our incentive should be getting paid for writing the code as a work for hire, not coding on spec and then rent-seeking against people for finding it useful.
Before software, this was much less feasible and generally nobody bothered (e.g., this is why they still sell cars without the hood welded shut, and why simpler computers used to come with schematics).
It would be an investment, but for a software developer these are professional tools. The problem, though, is that free alternatives exist for those who don't mind a learning curve.
This seems only be a problem for software developers though. Every other profession out there builds their workflows around proprietary expensive tools and it works out all fine.
But we software developers are a special kind. We expect people to work for free (as in no money) to create tools for us we then can use to earn money.
This! If people think that getting to use expensive proprietary software is somehow appreciation, that seems like a massive failure of education in basics of economics?
Getting to learn skills that you can't use unless you continue to pay for the expensive right to use those skills should be valued negatively by a rational economic agent.
I have no problem paying for software if there isn't a high quality piece of open source software immediately available.
I would rather pay $100 for a piece of software with great documentation and quick setup then spend a day trying to figure out a mostly undocumented but free and open source solution. A lot of people forget the value of their own time when figuring these things out.
The price does also play a role. Learning tools and frameworks takes a lot of time, and if it's not a free tool then if you change jobs or even departments you might find yourself unable to get a license. If you want to work on stuff at home, you need to pay. If you want to run a test server you need a license. Some tools are better than others in that regard, but it's basically why I would always choose learning a slightly worse free option than a paid option.
Because you depend on a tool that you're not willing to pay for .. is it so difficult to see that you are being viewed as a bit of a scrooge, given that you will profit greatly from software you don't own and haven't paid for .. ?
I feel strongly about it because this mentality reduced the market of selling software tools to a niche, to the point that to earn money selling tools, we have to sell them to enterprise customers, the only ones willing to pay for software.
This is why most companies selling such software tools have switched their basic versions from "trial during X days/trial license" to free (beer), while trying to seduce developers to eventually pay for the full version.
I'm just dumbfounded that we in the software community, with all of our tools for sharing knowledge, and buying apps, would have any problem with this.
Tools that share knowledge are inherently good. Creating an efficient marketplace for knowledge transfer is good. Allowing a mixed for-free, for-pay market is amazingly good.
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