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> I was increasingly getting upset about their extension marketplace, where there is an increased number of extensions starting to sell pro versions of the exte

> I was increasingly getting upset about their extension marketplace, where there is an increased number of extensions starting to sell pro versions of the extensions we used for free. This is actually great news. Some extensions, especially language ones, are very poor, and paying for them (if someone makes a commercial version) is the only way to guarantee a good development experience. Ruby is an example, and switching to IntelliJ is not smooth for people used to VSC.

rnd420_69 4y ago
reminds me when Bethesda tried to introduce paid mods on Steam. I was greatly excited about that for the reasons you state. But the gaming community being physically or mentally at an age of 14 prevented that with quite an outreach. Would've thought someone with enough braincells to learn programming would look at this differently, but there you have it.
- devwastaken 4y ago
  Theft. That's the reason. People could upload others mods to be paid. Or they would use assets they were not allowed to sell. The cost of litigating this is far too high, therefore a system that allows the theft cannot be regulated civilly. Meaning the system should not exist. Mods work better in an open and free environment that lacks monetary incentives.
  - xeromal 4y ago
    We can't figure out how to protect content creators so they should just do work for free seems like a cop out to me.
    - BlueDingo 4y ago
      Or maybe they know the cost and it isn't worth it to them? The poster you respond to mentions litigation. That's how IP theft is handled. How much legal fees does anyone want to incur for due diligence or litigation or defense for mods and plug-ins. Only the top few will earn enough to justify the effort. Everything under that will be left to fester. Quality free and low cost mods will get copied and promoted to scam money and the people working hard, that you and I both wish to help and support, would get no help or compensation.
- have_faith 4y ago
  Wasn't that mostly about Bethesda/Steam trying to capture the mod market and skim a percentage off of every transaction? Probably taking a page out of the iOS playbook.
  - belltaco 4y ago
    If I have ever learnt something on tech related forums, it's that everything becomes magically okay when Apple does it and the benefits outweigh the costs.
- matheusmoreira 4y ago
  Your argument falls flat when faced with rich history of modding and hacking. So many incredible creations were labors of love. Plenty of them eventually became commercial products.
devwastaken 4y ago
Paying for software does not have a relationship with quality. Imagine if GCC had a "pro" version that was necessary to compile certain code. That would be devastating to those learning and thousands of devs that came before would be spinning in their graves. The reason we do open source and free software is to make life easier for everyone, including your job. It standardizes practices and prevents mudball codebases comprised of black box libraries and tools. Not to mention that selling of extensions is like selling of game mods. There's tons of stolen code.
- IshKebab 4y ago
  It definitely has a relationship with quality in a fair number of domains. Find me free CAD software as good as SOLIDWORKS, or free maths software as good as MATLAB & Mathematica, or free EDA software as good as Altium or Vivado. There are loads of domains where none of the free options are very good.
  - aDfbrtVt 4y ago
    I agree with you for the most part, I write this while running Matlab simulations in the background. Having tried to reach similar levels of productivity with Julia or Python, I find the FOSS environments always fall short in the tooling environment. Not to mention the importance of documentation. However, I can't help but take exception to Vivado and SOLIDWORKS being good software... While powerful, they are both incredibly buggy and prone to crashing if you so much as look at them wrong.
    - cycomanic 4y ago
      The only use case I can think where matlab beats Python or Julia is when one has a lot of legacy code. It's funny that you mention documentation, the amount of documentation found around Python is typically much better than matlab. Matlab toolboxes are really hit and miss, some are very good, but there are some really crappy ones. If you actually need to include more traditional programming features matlab becomes a hot mess. Looking at matlab GUI code gives me nightmares for weeks....
chexum 4y ago
Are you trying to repeat Bill Gates's Open Letter TO Hobbyists? You're still missing "Most directly, the thing you do is theft." I think the past 46 years have proved, that free software works, no matter how many Bills want (or will) get rich off the industry. If there were no hobbyists either literally stealing software, or indirectly "stealing" it, because it's free, there would be no industry to profit from.
- belltaco 4y ago
  As Heartbleed and numerous other examples show, the corporations freeload and then barely give anything back. There should be a nuanced middle ground between charging everyone for everything and not letting corporations that collectively make hundreds of billions if not more of revenue off software get away with contributing nothing back.
coldtea 4y ago
> I was increasingly getting upset about their extension marketplace, where there is an increased number of extensions starting to sell pro versions of the extensions we used for free. So, "I'm a professional developer, but I don't like other programmers getting paid for their extensions (that I do, nonetheless, find valuable, and want to use)"?
- yunohn 4y ago
  I love this developer dissonance where they work at companies selling software, but refuse to pay for others’ software. Truly a sight to behold!
  - coldtea 4y ago
    It makes sense for an artist creating underground work, and not getting paid for it (e.g. actually illegal graphitti artist, or some avant guarde type that works a different day job and doesn't want to "sell out" to galleries) to be against the commercialization of art. But for programmers living off programming? Less so.
  - belltaco 4y ago
    I know of two director level folks (they were promoted from being devs, but not geeky enough to read HN or dev blogs) who would repeatedly use 'open source' only as a full synonym for 'free of charge' in multiple conversations about tools and paying for them. For example when comparing software, "we need to pay for X but Y is open source".
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

rnd420_69 4y ago

reminds me when Bethesda tried to introduce paid mods on Steam. I was greatly excited about that for the reasons you state. But the gaming community being physically or mentally at an age of 14 prevented that with quite an outreach. Would've thought someone with enough braincells to learn programming would look at this differently, but there you have it.

devwastaken 4y ago
Theft. That's the reason. People could upload others mods to be paid. Or they would use assets they were not allowed to sell. The cost of litigating this is far too high, therefore a system that allows the theft cannot be regulated civilly. Meaning the system should not exist. Mods work better in an open and free environment that lacks monetary incentives.
- xeromal 4y ago
  We can't figure out how to protect content creators so they should just do work for free seems like a cop out to me.
  - BlueDingo 4y ago
    Or maybe they know the cost and it isn't worth it to them? The poster you respond to mentions litigation. That's how IP theft is handled. How much legal fees does anyone want to incur for due diligence or litigation or defense for mods and plug-ins. Only the top few will earn enough to justify the effort. Everything under that will be left to fester. Quality free and low cost mods will get copied and promoted to scam money and the people working hard, that you and I both wish to help and support, would get no help or compensation.
have_faith 4y ago
Wasn't that mostly about Bethesda/Steam trying to capture the mod market and skim a percentage off of every transaction? Probably taking a page out of the iOS playbook.
- belltaco 4y ago
  If I have ever learnt something on tech related forums, it's that everything becomes magically okay when Apple does it and the benefits outweigh the costs.
matheusmoreira 4y ago
Your argument falls flat when faced with rich history of modding and hacking. So many incredible creations were labors of love. Plenty of them eventually became commercial products.

devwastaken 4y ago

Paying for software does not have a relationship with quality. Imagine if GCC had a "pro" version that was necessary to compile certain code. That would be devastating to those learning and thousands of devs that came before would be spinning in their graves. The reason we do open source and free software is to make life easier for everyone, including your job. It standardizes practices and prevents mudball codebases comprised of black box libraries and tools. Not to mention that selling of extensions is like selling of game mods. There's tons of stolen code.

IshKebab 4y ago
It definitely has a relationship with quality in a fair number of domains. Find me free CAD software as good as SOLIDWORKS, or free maths software as good as MATLAB & Mathematica, or free EDA software as good as Altium or Vivado. There are loads of domains where none of the free options are very good.
- aDfbrtVt 4y ago
  I agree with you for the most part, I write this while running Matlab simulations in the background. Having tried to reach similar levels of productivity with Julia or Python, I find the FOSS environments always fall short in the tooling environment. Not to mention the importance of documentation. However, I can't help but take exception to Vivado and SOLIDWORKS being good software... While powerful, they are both incredibly buggy and prone to crashing if you so much as look at them wrong.
  - cycomanic 4y ago
    The only use case I can think where matlab beats Python or Julia is when one has a lot of legacy code. It's funny that you mention documentation, the amount of documentation found around Python is typically much better than matlab. Matlab toolboxes are really hit and miss, some are very good, but there are some really crappy ones. If you actually need to include more traditional programming features matlab becomes a hot mess. Looking at matlab GUI code gives me nightmares for weeks....

chexum 4y ago

Are you trying to repeat Bill Gates's Open Letter TO Hobbyists? You're still missing "Most directly, the thing you do is theft." I think the past 46 years have proved, that free software works, no matter how many Bills want (or will) get rich off the industry. If there were no hobbyists either literally stealing software, or indirectly "stealing" it, because it's free, there would be no industry to profit from.

belltaco 4y ago
As Heartbleed and numerous other examples show, the corporations freeload and then barely give anything back. There should be a nuanced middle ground between charging everyone for everything and not letting corporations that collectively make hundreds of billions if not more of revenue off software get away with contributing nothing back.

coldtea 4y ago

> I was increasingly getting upset about their extension marketplace, where there is an increased number of extensions starting to sell pro versions of the extensions we used for free. So, "I'm a professional developer, but I don't like other programmers getting paid for their extensions (that I do, nonetheless, find valuable, and want to use)"?

yunohn 4y ago
I love this developer dissonance where they work at companies selling software, but refuse to pay for others’ software. Truly a sight to behold!
- coldtea 4y ago
  It makes sense for an artist creating underground work, and not getting paid for it (e.g. actually illegal graphitti artist, or some avant guarde type that works a different day job and doesn't want to "sell out" to galleries) to be against the commercialization of art. But for programmers living off programming? Less so.
- belltaco 4y ago
  I know of two director level folks (they were promoted from being devs, but not geeky enough to read HN or dev blogs) who would repeatedly use 'open source' only as a full synonym for 'free of charge' in multiple conversations about tools and paying for them. For example when comparing software, "we need to pay for X but Y is open source".

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]