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> I never fully understood why we do not have the "a good tool saves me x hours, and makes me happy while doing my work so I should pay for it" culture. SW engi

by ac29 7y ago

> I never fully understood why we do not have the "a good tool saves me x hours, and makes me happy while doing my work so I should pay for it" culture. SW engineers are pretty well paid and companies themselves have decent margins so this penny pinching tendency is upsetting. Don't we spend on software, though? Software spend is surely in the billions, if not tens or hundreds of billions a year. As consummate consumers of software, I'd think software engineers are more likely to spend money on software than the general public (and more likely to use open-source software as well).

dman 7y ago
Worth thinking about the number of companies globally that make a living writing software in the following categories of development tools a. Debuggers b. IDEs c. Querying Tools d. Text editors e. Source control tools f. Build systems The market for development tools does not look particularly vibrant based on the above.
- leoedin 7y ago
  I work in the embedded space and so I have used a few proprietary debuggers/IDEs/build systems. They've still got a lot of market share. The huge problem with them is that they're proprietary. They don't have the wide usage of the open source equivalents, so debugging problems is hard. If you want to develop at home, at work and on a PC in a lab, you have to navigate licensing issues. If you want to do a build and test as part of your CI process, you have to navigate licensing issues. Then you move jobs and they've bought into a different, incompatible proprietary system and you have to learn it all over again. The open source options are actually good enough, and the advantage of being able to have the entire build system on a new computer after running a few apt-gets and downloading some free software is huge. The skills persist across jobs, I can use them at home for my own projects, I never have to worry about licenses expiring.
- wslh 7y ago
  I have a company in this space and our software components and tools were more a marketing tool for our services than a product based business. Most often a customer buy a software component and require to build a product around it. Doing this we got customers like Trend Micro, Symantec, and Dell.
- lallysingh 7y ago
  Most of these started off with proprietary options that people left. These tools often need to solve lots of little problems for lots of different people, and it's difficult for companies to keep up. But, these are all pretty easy to start for a single hacker who can recruit help to expand an open source version.

by ac29 7y ago

dman 7y ago

Worth thinking about the number of companies globally that make a living writing software in the following categories of development tools a. Debuggers b. IDEs c. Querying Tools d. Text editors e. Source control tools f. Build systems The market for development tools does not look particularly vibrant based on the above.

leoedin 7y ago
I work in the embedded space and so I have used a few proprietary debuggers/IDEs/build systems. They've still got a lot of market share. The huge problem with them is that they're proprietary. They don't have the wide usage of the open source equivalents, so debugging problems is hard. If you want to develop at home, at work and on a PC in a lab, you have to navigate licensing issues. If you want to do a build and test as part of your CI process, you have to navigate licensing issues. Then you move jobs and they've bought into a different, incompatible proprietary system and you have to learn it all over again. The open source options are actually good enough, and the advantage of being able to have the entire build system on a new computer after running a few apt-gets and downloading some free software is huge. The skills persist across jobs, I can use them at home for my own projects, I never have to worry about licenses expiring.
wslh 7y ago
I have a company in this space and our software components and tools were more a marketing tool for our services than a product based business. Most often a customer buy a software component and require to build a product around it. Doing this we got customers like Trend Micro, Symantec, and Dell.
lallysingh 7y ago
Most of these started off with proprietary options that people left. These tools often need to solve lots of little problems for lots of different people, and it's difficult for companies to keep up. But, these are all pretty easy to start for a single hacker who can recruit help to expand an open source version.