4 ms·

> convenience of not having to write all the stuff Its the difference of not paying for the stuff. In the past you would pay a vendor and they would give you

by nikau 4y ago

> convenience of not having to write all the stuff Its the difference of not paying for the stuff. In the past you would pay a vendor and they would give you libraries and provide bug fixes and vulnerability patches.

mike_hearn 4y ago
And stable APIs, and large integrated product suites that solved the whole problem, and that vendor was incentivized to stick around and maintain the product even if it wasn't cool anymore. Unfortunately the way dev compensation works (i.e. mostly salaried with big jumps possible from job hopping), we're all very incentivized to go with free stuff today even if it actually turns into a major source of tech debt tomorrow. After all, if you're paid by the hour does it really matter if you spend days or weeks fighting with abandoned dependencies? It matters to the company but to the individual it can even be a benefit, because you get experience with things that look good on the CV. That in turn damages the market for developer tools, creating a self-fulfilling prophecy where not many people try to compete against free, so people conclude it's just the natural state of things and can't be any better. I see this problem with my own product: our customers mostly come to us in a sort of shell-shocked state where they've lost a lot of time and hair trying to make the available open source tooling work for them, and decide to buy ours as a sort of last resort. Then they get it all working, we help them fix any issues, they have a good experience in the end and are happy. Unfortunately people have to go through that bad experience first because everyone's initial instinct is always to go with the free stuff, and indeed they probably won't even find out about the alternatives because there's a culture in which open source projects only want to advertise or integrate with other open source projects. So the author asks, how did we get here? That's how.

by nikau 4y ago

mike_hearn 4y ago

And stable APIs, and large integrated product suites that solved the whole problem, and that vendor was incentivized to stick around and maintain the product even if it wasn't cool anymore. Unfortunately the way dev compensation works (i.e. mostly salaried with big jumps possible from job hopping), we're all very incentivized to go with free stuff today even if it actually turns into a major source of tech debt tomorrow. After all, if you're paid by the hour does it really matter if you spend days or weeks fighting with abandoned dependencies? It matters to the company but to the individual it can even be a benefit, because you get experience with things that look good on the CV. That in turn damages the market for developer tools, creating a self-fulfilling prophecy where not many people try to compete against free, so people conclude it's just the natural state of things and can't be any better. I see this problem with my own product: our customers mostly come to us in a sort of shell-shocked state where they've lost a lot of time and hair trying to make the available open source tooling work for them, and decide to buy ours as a sort of last resort. Then they get it all working, we help them fix any issues, they have a good experience in the end and are happy. Unfortunately people have to go through that bad experience first because everyone's initial instinct is always to go with the free stuff, and indeed they probably won't even find out about the alternatives because there's a culture in which open source projects only want to advertise or integrate with other open source projects. So the author asks, how did we get here? That's how.