Developer tools have always been a tough business to be in. On one hand, you have tools that people love to use that pay the bills. I’m thinking about tools lik

Developer tools have always been a tough business to be in. On one hand, you have tools that people love to use that pay the bills. I’m thinking about tools like IntelliJ. But for each of these, there is an Eclipse project that is right there trying to keep pace. And many companies choose Eclipse because it’s free, but others choose IntelliJ because of the quality. I use Eclipse for Kava projects because it’s “good enough” and when I started programming Java, paying for IntelliJ wasn’t something I could afford. On the other hand, we’re developers… so many of us like building our own tools. Why are there so many options for text editors? Depending on the type of tool, it might just be easier/fun to build your own tool. It is possible to make money in FOSS, but you really have to get the business plan right from the beginning. It’s a hard business to be in. If you haven’t read it, “Dreaming in Code” by Scott Rosenberg is a great story about just how hard it is to make a successful FOSS project, even for experienced teams. It details all of the ups and downs of the Chandler project from the early 2000’s.