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I think most of us value our freedom more. Most people don't think of it in terms of freedom, but freedom it is. With proprietary software: - You don't know w

I think most of us value our freedom more. Most people don't think of it in terms of freedom, but freedom it is. With proprietary software: - You don't know when it will disappear or be discontinued. Even your paid-for existing version stops working when the activation servers go down. - You might be forced into an "upgrade" which breaks something you rely on - That's not to mention issues like being able to fix bugs yourself, extend it, or understand it. I don't do this often directly, but something like being able to understand a file format my data is in or similar is common I don't mind paying for things, but things need to be a lot better on other axes before this one becomes the most important. My experience is that: - Things I did decades ago are sometimes useful. Nearly 100% of the time, if this was in a proprietary system, it's gone or unusable. My LaTeX files still work. - Companies switch between growth mode and cash cow mode. When this happens, the cost to me is almost always higher than the initial benefit over free. - Which is better on other axes goes back-and-forth. An investment I make into a tool now doesn't mean it will be the leading tool in five years. - Those sorts of long-term considerations are almost always more important than short-term technical stuff.

neurobashing 4y ago
So do you only work for companies who have 100% open source and whose business model or product is a public benefit? Eg, "I value my freedom" is a perfectly acceptable position, until Mark Zuckerberg starts signing your checks, you know?
- wiseowise 4y ago
  Facebook/Meta are huge contributors to open source, so I'm not sure what your comment is supposed to mean.
  - nightski 4y ago
    Their products are proprietary. Honestly open sourcing their stuff just nets free labor.
    - filoleg 4y ago
      Are you trying to claim that something like React/React Native/Jest weren't mostly done by Meta, but by the open source community, and Meta was just riding the coattails of their free work? You count VSCode to be in the same category as well (swap Meta for Microsoft instead)? That's quite a claim, and I dont believe it is substantiated.
      - nightski 4y ago
        No, I'm saying any benefit by open sourcing it vs. just keeping it in house (the difference) would be free labor. Not the entire project of course!
refulgentis 4y ago
Devs don't pay for tooling because it might be discontinued or have a paid upgrade? That seems short-sighted and perhaps an argument in search of a proponent.
- krab 4y ago
  The parent post argues that if you invest in learning or tweaking open source tools, they're useful to you over a longer period of time than the commercial counterparts in general. I don't read it as absolute. Just an explanation of their preference.
nojito 4y ago
Nothing to do with freedom. People are naturally cheap. Which is why free tiers are so popular.
- tharne 4y ago
  > Nothing to do with freedom. People are naturally cheap. I don't think this is true. Look at bars. I can go to a liquor store and buy alcohol at a fraction of what it costs in a bar and invite my friends over to drink together. Yet, bars which charge a massive markup on the same exact alcohol, do not seem to be in danger of going out of business. Or look at coffee. You can buy a bag of Starbucks coffee in the grocery store for $10 and it will make many pots of coffee, providing a single individual a cup of coffee a day for 2 weeks or more. Yet, on any given morning you can spot long lines of people eagerly waiting to pay 3 or 4 dollars for a single cup of the exact same coffee they could have made at home for one tenth the cost, that probably would have required less time and effort than going to Starbucks.
  - nojito 4y ago
    That's paying for convenience which is a different behavior.
    - cowtools 4y ago
      What is the convenience?
      - SenHeng 4y ago
        - you don’t have to learn how to make all the variations of drinks each of your friends like - you don’t have to stock ingredients for food/drinks you may not like or prepare often - you can’t make a din without annoying the neighbours - you don’t have to rent a space just to play loud music or dance - you don’t have to make a music selection - you don’t have to invite large numbers of people who don’t know each other to help make new connections - you don’t have to clean up every time anyone pukes
    - 4y ago
cdrini 4y ago
Most of your points also apply to open source software, and aren't strict requirements for proprietary software. - discontinued: Atom just got discontinued. It's open source. Photoshop on the other hand has withstood the test of time. - Audacity's 3.0 update removed a feature I relied on. I wasn't forced to update to it, sure, but proprietary software doesn't force updates either. - Being able to fix your own bugs is a great part of open source! But not something most professional software developers really expect to do for their IDE. - open source formats are probably more resilient than closed source, but I would argue many proprietary formats are also pretty resilient. Code is also based on plain text at it's core, like latex, so it's always going to be pretty resilient. - you'll never have a guarantee that a tool you invest time in or money in will be the leading tool in five years.
- Shared404 4y ago
  > discontinued: Atom just got discontinued. It's open source. Photoshop on the other hand has withstood the test of time. But if I want to use Atom I can fork it, or keep the source around. It doesn't go away from my environment until _I_ say it does. And Photoshop has become more and more user hostile over time. > Audacity's 3.0 update removed a feature I relied on. I wasn't forced to update to it, sure, but proprietary software doesn't force updates either. It is impossible for libre software to force updates, and quite possible for proprietary software to do so. It's part of what pushed me away from Windows in the first place, and other apps (especially web, but also other stuff) also do so. > Being able to fix your own bugs is a great part of open source! But not something most professional software developers really expect to do for their IDE. While it isn't expected, it's definitely a nice-to-have. > open source formats are probably more resilient than closed source, but I would argue many proprietary formats are also pretty resilient. Code is also based on plain text at it's core, like latex, so it's always going to be pretty resilient. But with libre software, I don't have to wonder. Even if a project uses an obtuse, obfuscated binary format I know I'll still be able to read it (with a little prep work). With code this is less of an issue - as you note - but you did mention Photoshop earlier, so I'm assuming we're talking about software in general. > you'll never have a guarantee that a tool you invest time in or money in will be the leading tool in five years. I don't need it to he leading, I need it to be around and functional. Pretty confident Emacs/(n)vim will be here a couple decades longer at least. I believe this was GP's point - that it's better to worry about what will work best in 10 years, not what's standard now.
jefftime 4y ago
To piggyback off this, another reason that I think software freedom is valuable is community support. Things like LSPs, syntax highlighters, and that sort of support doesn't have to wait on JetBrains to integrate it into their IDE. I think there is real value to the community being able to hack on a tool and not being at the whim of a single developer's priorities
- dannymi 4y ago
  I just adapted the intellij-rust plugin from https://github.com/intellij-rust/intellij-rust https://github.com/intellij-rust/intellij-rust to syntax highlight Rust slightly better. It works just fine, and I had to coordinate with nobody. Just edit file, build plugin, install plugin to the IDE (using the menu in the GUI interface). That's it. Most of the stuff of Jetbrains is open source (under Apache Software License) and is available on github. I know what you mean though: I would never again use a closed-source IDE, or a language with closed-source standard library. Microsoft Visual Studio made me learn that, decades ago.
- drclau 4y ago
  You can write and publish your own plugins for JetBrains IDEs. https://plugins.jetbrains.com/ https://plugins.jetbrains.com/
  - another_story 4y ago
    You can also sell your plugins, but it does feel less "good" to be adding value to a commercial product that you're not a part of. By that, I mean there is somewhat of a sense of community around OSS that you can't replicate within a commercial space.
- 5e92cb50239222b 4y ago
  Except for core functionality, everything in JetBrains' IDEs is written as plugins (grammar checking, themes, support for Go/PHP/Ruby/Python/Android/framework of the month, the list goes on). You just don't notice it because of good integration with the rest of the editor (unlike how it's done in Eclipse). Those can be (and are) developed by anybody. For example, IDEA has had absolutely the best Rust story for many years, and the Rust plugin became official only recently. It was created and developed for years before that by a single developer not affiliated with JB (and still blew all other editors out of the water).
andyjohnson0 4y ago
> You don't know when it will disappear or be discontinued. I've been using Visual Studio pretty much every working day for over twenty years. I have zero worries that is will disappear any time soon. I still think its the best IDE out there, and I've never felt that my freedom was being compromised by using it.
- blip54321 4y ago
  You are so incredibly wrong. Visual Studio was a horrible IDE for most of the past 20 years, relative to competitors. Quite literally the only reason it picked up marketshare was that it supported new Windows features before Borland could. Borland was miles ahead in every other respect. Microsoft continued to suck, in virtually all respects, relative to competition, until around 2015. I don't quite understand how Microsoft suddenly became competent, and released an awesome IDE, but that's a very new phenomenon.
rnd420_69 4y ago
- matheusmoreira 4y ago
  Yes, we do value freedom more. It doesn't matter much effort it took to develop if the resulting software is user hostile and freedom denying. We want to be empowered and liberated by software. We don't want to be peasants in your digital fiefdom.
bmitc 4y ago
I feel sentiments like these are straight paranoia. Nothing is forever. And I actually don't think I have experienced a paid piece of software suddenly changing or disappearing or causing headache. Yet, this happens all the time with free, open source software. The person developing it stops, it gets forked, now there's two versions with one the popular one but not developed and a forked one being developed but not popular, and the whole thing is difficult to contribute to because it's a big ball of mud. I will absolutely pay for software. What's more likely to cause issues? A company getting paid to develop useful software or some free, open source software where the developers have their own little fiefdom? Issues get closed all the time or ignored and then when you push the issue you just get told "that's not the way I do it" or "we're all volunteers and not paid, contributions welcome". Well yea, I would contribute if it wasn't impenetrable and I had confidence the contribution would actually be accepted. I have successfully contributed to larger projects where these things are taken more seriously, but they are the outlier.
ta988 4y ago
- You can keep your editor with Jetbrains even after the license expires, you just don't get updates. - They never force you into updates. - Many of my LaTeX files from 20 years ago don't work anymore unless I go back and go use old versions. - Your IDE does not modify your source code so your source code stays in an interpretable format. I agree that you loose the ability to modify and adapt your editor (beyond plugins but that's still pretty limited compared to what you can do with emacs for example) Using an editor doesn't force you to stay in a relation for life. if Jetbrains turns into a cash cow, I can go use any editor I want. Outside of muscle memory and preference, I have 0 dependency on them.
j1elo 4y ago
With proprietary software: - You might be forced into an "upgrade" which breaks something you rely on GNOME devs are laughing at this very hard right now while they look at your maximize icon. As of today, half baked decisions are still being made and forced to users all around. Like Gnome Terminal, where if you Select All, then Copy, it only copies the currently visible text, not the "All" you just selected. A conscious decision that was first made to work around some memory issue, and was later left as permanent behavior with no resort for users to revert back and absolutely no way to select and copy all text of a terminal. And it shipped for everybody to enjoy on the latest Ubuntu LTS. Nice. EDIT to mention that indeed it's nice that Ubuntu themselves would be in a position where the change could be reverted for their users, if they wanted. So that's indeed a very positive property of Open Source. Albeit assuming everybody has the means, the time, or even the ability to make such changes is kind of naive. But the possibility, yeah, it is there after all, and that's a good thing.
akagusu 4y ago
Sorry, but developers don't care about freedom, they just want things that are free == gratis == zero cost.
- stjohnswarts 4y ago
  that's not true. Sure the majority may not care but a sizeable and talented core do or we would have nothing but proprietary software to use right now.
mekster 4y ago
Along with your other points, you're not making any sense. > - That's not to mention issues like being able to fix bugs yourself, extend it, or understand it. I don't do this often directly That's just saying it's better for paid products because there's always someone paid to fix stuff instead of relying on volunteers. I care to get the work done in the easiest way possible. And I hardly believe JetBrains will go away anytime soon, besides, using less productive tools until you see the paid competitors leave is really a dumb idea. If JetBrains were to disappear tomorrow and somehow they disabled my perpetual license along with them, I'll have to switch to Vscode but why let go of the benefit with your hypothetical concerns that may not materialize for years to come? Sounds like you're just trying to create excuses to stay on your free apps.

neurobashing 4y ago

So do you only work for companies who have 100% open source and whose business model or product is a public benefit? Eg, "I value my freedom" is a perfectly acceptable position, until Mark Zuckerberg starts signing your checks, you know?

wiseowise 4y ago
Facebook/Meta are huge contributors to open source, so I'm not sure what your comment is supposed to mean.
- nightski 4y ago
  Their products are proprietary. Honestly open sourcing their stuff just nets free labor.
  - filoleg 4y ago
    Are you trying to claim that something like React/React Native/Jest weren't mostly done by Meta, but by the open source community, and Meta was just riding the coattails of their free work? You count VSCode to be in the same category as well (swap Meta for Microsoft instead)? That's quite a claim, and I dont believe it is substantiated.
    - nightski 4y ago
      No, I'm saying any benefit by open sourcing it vs. just keeping it in house (the difference) would be free labor. Not the entire project of course!

refulgentis 4y ago

Devs don't pay for tooling because it might be discontinued or have a paid upgrade? That seems short-sighted and perhaps an argument in search of a proponent.

krab 4y ago
The parent post argues that if you invest in learning or tweaking open source tools, they're useful to you over a longer period of time than the commercial counterparts in general. I don't read it as absolute. Just an explanation of their preference.

nojito 4y ago

Nothing to do with freedom. People are naturally cheap. Which is why free tiers are so popular.

tharne 4y ago
> Nothing to do with freedom. People are naturally cheap. I don't think this is true. Look at bars. I can go to a liquor store and buy alcohol at a fraction of what it costs in a bar and invite my friends over to drink together. Yet, bars which charge a massive markup on the same exact alcohol, do not seem to be in danger of going out of business. Or look at coffee. You can buy a bag of Starbucks coffee in the grocery store for $10 and it will make many pots of coffee, providing a single individual a cup of coffee a day for 2 weeks or more. Yet, on any given morning you can spot long lines of people eagerly waiting to pay 3 or 4 dollars for a single cup of the exact same coffee they could have made at home for one tenth the cost, that probably would have required less time and effort than going to Starbucks.
- nojito 4y ago
  That's paying for convenience which is a different behavior.
  - cowtools 4y ago
    What is the convenience?
    - SenHeng 4y ago
      - you don’t have to learn how to make all the variations of drinks each of your friends like - you don’t have to stock ingredients for food/drinks you may not like or prepare often - you can’t make a din without annoying the neighbours - you don’t have to rent a space just to play loud music or dance - you don’t have to make a music selection - you don’t have to invite large numbers of people who don’t know each other to help make new connections - you don’t have to clean up every time anyone pukes
  - 4y ago

cdrini 4y ago

Most of your points also apply to open source software, and aren't strict requirements for proprietary software. - discontinued: Atom just got discontinued. It's open source. Photoshop on the other hand has withstood the test of time. - Audacity's 3.0 update removed a feature I relied on. I wasn't forced to update to it, sure, but proprietary software doesn't force updates either. - Being able to fix your own bugs is a great part of open source! But not something most professional software developers really expect to do for their IDE. - open source formats are probably more resilient than closed source, but I would argue many proprietary formats are also pretty resilient. Code is also based on plain text at it's core, like latex, so it's always going to be pretty resilient. - you'll never have a guarantee that a tool you invest time in or money in will be the leading tool in five years.

Shared404 4y ago
> discontinued: Atom just got discontinued. It's open source. Photoshop on the other hand has withstood the test of time. But if I want to use Atom I can fork it, or keep the source around. It doesn't go away from my environment until _I_ say it does. And Photoshop has become more and more user hostile over time. > Audacity's 3.0 update removed a feature I relied on. I wasn't forced to update to it, sure, but proprietary software doesn't force updates either. It is impossible for libre software to force updates, and quite possible for proprietary software to do so. It's part of what pushed me away from Windows in the first place, and other apps (especially web, but also other stuff) also do so. > Being able to fix your own bugs is a great part of open source! But not something most professional software developers really expect to do for their IDE. While it isn't expected, it's definitely a nice-to-have. > open source formats are probably more resilient than closed source, but I would argue many proprietary formats are also pretty resilient. Code is also based on plain text at it's core, like latex, so it's always going to be pretty resilient. But with libre software, I don't have to wonder. Even if a project uses an obtuse, obfuscated binary format I know I'll still be able to read it (with a little prep work). With code this is less of an issue - as you note - but you did mention Photoshop earlier, so I'm assuming we're talking about software in general. > you'll never have a guarantee that a tool you invest time in or money in will be the leading tool in five years. I don't need it to he leading, I need it to be around and functional. Pretty confident Emacs/(n)vim will be here a couple decades longer at least. I believe this was GP's point - that it's better to worry about what will work best in 10 years, not what's standard now.

jefftime 4y ago

To piggyback off this, another reason that I think software freedom is valuable is community support. Things like LSPs, syntax highlighters, and that sort of support doesn't have to wait on JetBrains to integrate it into their IDE. I think there is real value to the community being able to hack on a tool and not being at the whim of a single developer's priorities

dannymi 4y ago
I just adapted the intellij-rust plugin from https://github.com/intellij-rust/intellij-rust https://github.com/intellij-rust/intellij-rust to syntax highlight Rust slightly better. It works just fine, and I had to coordinate with nobody. Just edit file, build plugin, install plugin to the IDE (using the menu in the GUI interface). That's it. Most of the stuff of Jetbrains is open source (under Apache Software License) and is available on github. I know what you mean though: I would never again use a closed-source IDE, or a language with closed-source standard library. Microsoft Visual Studio made me learn that, decades ago.
drclau 4y ago
You can write and publish your own plugins for JetBrains IDEs. https://plugins.jetbrains.com/ https://plugins.jetbrains.com/
- another_story 4y ago
  You can also sell your plugins, but it does feel less "good" to be adding value to a commercial product that you're not a part of. By that, I mean there is somewhat of a sense of community around OSS that you can't replicate within a commercial space.
5e92cb50239222b 4y ago
Except for core functionality, everything in JetBrains' IDEs is written as plugins (grammar checking, themes, support for Go/PHP/Ruby/Python/Android/framework of the month, the list goes on). You just don't notice it because of good integration with the rest of the editor (unlike how it's done in Eclipse). Those can be (and are) developed by anybody. For example, IDEA has had absolutely the best Rust story for many years, and the Rust plugin became official only recently. It was created and developed for years before that by a single developer not affiliated with JB (and still blew all other editors out of the water).

andyjohnson0 4y ago

> You don't know when it will disappear or be discontinued. I've been using Visual Studio pretty much every working day for over twenty years. I have zero worries that is will disappear any time soon. I still think its the best IDE out there, and I've never felt that my freedom was being compromised by using it.

blip54321 4y ago
You are so incredibly wrong. Visual Studio was a horrible IDE for most of the past 20 years, relative to competitors. Quite literally the only reason it picked up marketshare was that it supported new Windows features before Borland could. Borland was miles ahead in every other respect. Microsoft continued to suck, in virtually all respects, relative to competition, until around 2015. I don't quite understand how Microsoft suddenly became competent, and released an awesome IDE, but that's a very new phenomenon.

rnd420_69 4y ago

matheusmoreira 4y ago
Yes, we do value freedom more. It doesn't matter much effort it took to develop if the resulting software is user hostile and freedom denying. We want to be empowered and liberated by software. We don't want to be peasants in your digital fiefdom.

bmitc 4y ago

I feel sentiments like these are straight paranoia. Nothing is forever. And I actually don't think I have experienced a paid piece of software suddenly changing or disappearing or causing headache. Yet, this happens all the time with free, open source software. The person developing it stops, it gets forked, now there's two versions with one the popular one but not developed and a forked one being developed but not popular, and the whole thing is difficult to contribute to because it's a big ball of mud. I will absolutely pay for software. What's more likely to cause issues? A company getting paid to develop useful software or some free, open source software where the developers have their own little fiefdom? Issues get closed all the time or ignored and then when you push the issue you just get told "that's not the way I do it" or "we're all volunteers and not paid, contributions welcome". Well yea, I would contribute if it wasn't impenetrable and I had confidence the contribution would actually be accepted. I have successfully contributed to larger projects where these things are taken more seriously, but they are the outlier.

ta988 4y ago

- You can keep your editor with Jetbrains even after the license expires, you just don't get updates. - They never force you into updates. - Many of my LaTeX files from 20 years ago don't work anymore unless I go back and go use old versions. - Your IDE does not modify your source code so your source code stays in an interpretable format. I agree that you loose the ability to modify and adapt your editor (beyond plugins but that's still pretty limited compared to what you can do with emacs for example) Using an editor doesn't force you to stay in a relation for life. if Jetbrains turns into a cash cow, I can go use any editor I want. Outside of muscle memory and preference, I have 0 dependency on them.

j1elo 4y ago

With proprietary software: - You might be forced into an "upgrade" which breaks something you rely on GNOME devs are laughing at this very hard right now while they look at your maximize icon. As of today, half baked decisions are still being made and forced to users all around. Like Gnome Terminal, where if you Select All, then Copy, it only copies the currently visible text, not the "All" you just selected. A conscious decision that was first made to work around some memory issue, and was later left as permanent behavior with no resort for users to revert back and absolutely no way to select and copy all text of a terminal. And it shipped for everybody to enjoy on the latest Ubuntu LTS. Nice. EDIT to mention that indeed it's nice that Ubuntu themselves would be in a position where the change could be reverted for their users, if they wanted. So that's indeed a very positive property of Open Source. Albeit assuming everybody has the means, the time, or even the ability to make such changes is kind of naive. But the possibility, yeah, it is there after all, and that's a good thing.

akagusu 4y ago

Sorry, but developers don't care about freedom, they just want things that are free == gratis == zero cost.

stjohnswarts 4y ago
that's not true. Sure the majority may not care but a sizeable and talented core do or we would have nothing but proprietary software to use right now.

mekster 4y ago

Along with your other points, you're not making any sense. > - That's not to mention issues like being able to fix bugs yourself, extend it, or understand it. I don't do this often directly That's just saying it's better for paid products because there's always someone paid to fix stuff instead of relying on volunteers. I care to get the work done in the easiest way possible. And I hardly believe JetBrains will go away anytime soon, besides, using less productive tools until you see the paid competitors leave is really a dumb idea. If JetBrains were to disappear tomorrow and somehow they disabled my perpetual license along with them, I'll have to switch to Vscode but why let go of the benefit with your hypothetical concerns that may not materialize for years to come? Sounds like you're just trying to create excuses to stay on your free apps.