pjmlp longs for the days when developers (and/or their employers) paid for their tools because he believes that this allowed them to create tools of higher over

pjmlp longs for the days when developers (and/or their employers) paid for their tools because he believes that this allowed them to create tools of higher overall quality than the free FLOSS stuff you find nowadays that may excel in one area which developers find interesting/fun but are awful in several others and largely proliferate not because of their quality but of their price. His comments basically follow out of this starting point so if you have that in mind they start to make sense. (and TBH i do not completely disagree with this view myself, though i do not see the point of repeating it everywhere, this train not only left the station long time ago but the station has long been converted to an Amazon warehouse - besides it isn't like the development tools of old were always that great... to be relatively on topic, there were a ton of DBMSs that simply failed and others that started nice but created stinkers so awful that killed the entire company - see dBase as a great example for that)