If you want mass adoption, yes. For whatever reason, few developers want to pay for their tools. Maybe we've been spoiled by all the open source ones. A few co

If you want mass adoption, yes. For whatever reason, few developers want to pay for their tools. Maybe we've been spoiled by all the open source ones. A few companies manage to get people to pay for tools (e.g. Unity, Visual Studio), but they're the exception, and it's more due to a lack of open source offerings with comparable features. No one would pay a license for a new JS framework or for a compiler outside of niches, which is where proprietary tools still survive. If you want mass adoption, you need a complete free offering (as in beer and as in freedom). Which sucks for the tool vendors, since that's a lot harder to monetize, if not impossible. On the other hand, it's a boon for people getting started since they can try out all these tools without a monetary investement, and it's great for companies who don't need to pay for the code they base their whole business on.