6 ms·

The highest quality tools in the software development space tend to be FOSS, because unlike any other field, we are employed in the field that makes the tools o

The highest quality tools in the software development space tend to be FOSS, because unlike any other field, we are employed in the field that makes the tools our field uses, and distribution and manufacturing costs are zero. People build tools that they want to use, then share it with others because it's free to. If the rest of the economy worked like this we would be in full-blown utopia. Selling software to software developers is always going to have a pretty low ceiling, because you're always going to be competing with "I could build this myself" while dealing with a bunch of users who will have the nagging thought of "Why the heck does this bug exist/this feature not exist? I could fix this in an afternoon." Ironically, open source relieves this pressure for multiple orders of magnitude more people than actually contribute, because they're only grappling with their own laziness, rather than resenting you, the developer.

aembleton 9mo ago
> you're always going to be competing with "I could build this myself" Even more so these days with agentic coding
NamlchakKhandro 9mo ago
> distribution and manufacturing costs are zero. ???? citation needed
- tekne 9mo ago
  Once the software is written, it is ~free to copy. People pay a lot of money to avoid the software getting copied... and it gets copied anyways.
  - stevefan1999 9mo ago
    The thing is that one software is easy to crack and copy, so it is cheap...but a lot of softwares to work together is not, so that's why we have SaaS and PaaS today.
- OkayPhysicist 9mo ago
  To clarify, I used "manufacturing" there, as opposed to R&D, to differentiate from physical stuff. Software costs lots to develop, but nothing to make a second copy of.
anonymous908213 9mo ago
> The highest quality tools in the software development space tend to be FOSS > People build tools that they want to use, then share it with others because it's free to This maybe sounds true on the surface, but isn't really? Prior to VSCode, Visual Studio was the most-used editor by professional developers for a very long time, with Sublime Text and Jetbrains' IDEs being close behind, and the paid options are still among the most popular. While VSCode is wildly successful, and has completely unprecedented adoption rates, it was not borne out of people "building tools because they want to, then sharing it because it's free", but is rather the result of Microsoft's calculated gamble that open-source would give them more ecosystem capture and useful data through telemetry in the long run. > Selling software to software developers is always going to have a pretty low ceiling, because you're always going to be competing with "I could build this myself" This shouldn't really be true if software developers would think rationally about tools for three seconds. I believe the US median compensation for developers is approaching $200k? Any tool that saves a single hour of productivity is likely paying for itself, maybe two or three for the more expensive ones. Something that saves 40 hours of productivity is basically worth its weight in gold. You might be able to say "I can build this myself", but can you build it yourself in 1 hour? 40 hours? For most software, it would still take even longer than that. If you are a paid professional, and value your own time anywhere near what your employer does (I personally value my time more than any employer ever did), you should be extremely grateful for any opportunity to spend trivial sums of money in a way that allows you to reclaim hours to use in other ways.
- palata 9mo ago
  I believe that there is a difference between developers as persons and developers as employees. As a person, I don't think that I am very likely to pay for the tool I use to develop in my free time. As an employee, I need to convince my company to pay for the tool. If it is a subscription, that's even worse. So well-known ones like Microsoft tools might already be approved, but for not-so-famous ones, it's harder. If I want to depend on a third-party library/tool, I need to convince my company that the licence is fine, that the security is fine, and if it's not free I need to convince them to pay for it.
- nodja 9mo ago
d0liver 9mo ago
> Manufacturing costs are zero No. The fact that you built something yourself doesn't make it free to produce. More over, you __won't__. You simply cannot build all of the things that you could buy at scale. What if you had to write all of your own video games? Or operating systems?
- eucyclos 9mo ago
  I think they mean cost of incremental units. 0->1 is much more expensive than 1->100 in software, unlike with things like lattes or houses
  - d0liver 9mo ago
    I assumed that they meant "cost of production", since that's what you give to keep your money, so that includes 0->1. But if what they meant is what you said then I'd say that the cost of 0->1 is not somehow less important. Software does make 1->100 much more accessible though, so, in that way, you have an opportunity to help out very small businesses in a way that you can't in other industries, which is even more of a reason to buy code from your peers, IMO.
    - croon 9mo ago
      I think the comparison to other industries is that while they pay for tools, it's not the inventor of the hammer that gets paid, but the producer of the unit, which in software is ~0. I'm not arguing against paying/donating to FOSS, but I do support the discrete distinction to physical tools.
      - d0liver 9mo ago
        If the tool is saving you a large chunk of time, then why does it matter what's happening in another industry? We seem to be losing a really simple thread here: Pay for things because they present more value to you than you're giving away in payment. Y'all seem to have some notion of what constitutes "fair" payment that you're so attached to that you're willing to shoot yourselves in the foot.
andai 9mo ago
> People build tools that they want to use, then share it with others because it's free to. If the rest of the economy worked like this we would be in full-blown utopia. Post-AGI economics seems to bring cost of production and distribution very close to zero, so this may soon come to pass. Culture might need a minute to catch up though!
- oblio 9mo ago
  > Post-AGI economics seems to bring cost of production and distribution very close to zero, so this may soon come to pass. Culture might need a minute to catch up though! People on HN read too much SciFi.
com2kid 9mo ago
Back when MSDN subscriptions where a thing and people still used Visual Studio, the tools were a lot better. Debuggers worked and did impressive things (time travel debugging! Rewind your entire program state! Step through from your website code all the way to your database queries within the same debugging session! Easily debug remote servers!). Developer documentation was professionally written and edited. Now everything is free and we get what we pay for.
behnamoh 9mo ago
> The highest quality tools in the software development space tend to be FOSS LLMs are also software and OSS (let alone FOSS ones) aren't even close to the quality of closed models like GPT 5.2 or Opus 4.5.
- g-b-r 9mo ago
  LLMs are more money thrown at their training than software development, and you need prohibitive costly hardware to run the biggest ones. Calling some "OSS" is simply misleading.
xmprt 9mo ago
Very true. On immich, I've always wanted a way to do certain operations locally like adding to an album before the photo/video is fully uploaded, but I'm not frustrated that it's not possible because if I cared enough I'd create a pull request. For features that Google Photos is/was missing, I'm not as generous.
bilekas 9mo ago
> People build tools that they want to use, then share it with others because it's free to. If the rest of the economy worked like this we would be in full-blown utopia. But the rest of the economy doesn't work like this, so support your OSS projects financially.

aembleton 9mo ago

> you're always going to be competing with "I could build this myself" Even more so these days with agentic coding

NamlchakKhandro 9mo ago

> distribution and manufacturing costs are zero. ???? citation needed

tekne 9mo ago
Once the software is written, it is ~free to copy. People pay a lot of money to avoid the software getting copied... and it gets copied anyways.
- stevefan1999 9mo ago
  The thing is that one software is easy to crack and copy, so it is cheap...but a lot of softwares to work together is not, so that's why we have SaaS and PaaS today.
OkayPhysicist 9mo ago
To clarify, I used "manufacturing" there, as opposed to R&D, to differentiate from physical stuff. Software costs lots to develop, but nothing to make a second copy of.

anonymous908213 9mo ago

> The highest quality tools in the software development space tend to be FOSS > People build tools that they want to use, then share it with others because it's free to This maybe sounds true on the surface, but isn't really? Prior to VSCode, Visual Studio was the most-used editor by professional developers for a very long time, with Sublime Text and Jetbrains' IDEs being close behind, and the paid options are still among the most popular. While VSCode is wildly successful, and has completely unprecedented adoption rates, it was not borne out of people "building tools because they want to, then sharing it because it's free", but is rather the result of Microsoft's calculated gamble that open-source would give them more ecosystem capture and useful data through telemetry in the long run. > Selling software to software developers is always going to have a pretty low ceiling, because you're always going to be competing with "I could build this myself" This shouldn't really be true if software developers would think rationally about tools for three seconds. I believe the US median compensation for developers is approaching $200k? Any tool that saves a single hour of productivity is likely paying for itself, maybe two or three for the more expensive ones. Something that saves 40 hours of productivity is basically worth its weight in gold. You might be able to say "I can build this myself", but can you build it yourself in 1 hour? 40 hours? For most software, it would still take even longer than that. If you are a paid professional, and value your own time anywhere near what your employer does (I personally value my time more than any employer ever did), you should be extremely grateful for any opportunity to spend trivial sums of money in a way that allows you to reclaim hours to use in other ways.

palata 9mo ago
I believe that there is a difference between developers as persons and developers as employees. As a person, I don't think that I am very likely to pay for the tool I use to develop in my free time. As an employee, I need to convince my company to pay for the tool. If it is a subscription, that's even worse. So well-known ones like Microsoft tools might already be approved, but for not-so-famous ones, it's harder. If I want to depend on a third-party library/tool, I need to convince my company that the licence is fine, that the security is fine, and if it's not free I need to convince them to pay for it.
nodja 9mo ago

d0liver 9mo ago

> Manufacturing costs are zero No. The fact that you built something yourself doesn't make it free to produce. More over, you __won't__. You simply cannot build all of the things that you could buy at scale. What if you had to write all of your own video games? Or operating systems?

eucyclos 9mo ago
I think they mean cost of incremental units. 0->1 is much more expensive than 1->100 in software, unlike with things like lattes or houses
- d0liver 9mo ago
  I assumed that they meant "cost of production", since that's what you give to keep your money, so that includes 0->1. But if what they meant is what you said then I'd say that the cost of 0->1 is not somehow less important. Software does make 1->100 much more accessible though, so, in that way, you have an opportunity to help out very small businesses in a way that you can't in other industries, which is even more of a reason to buy code from your peers, IMO.
  - croon 9mo ago
    I think the comparison to other industries is that while they pay for tools, it's not the inventor of the hammer that gets paid, but the producer of the unit, which in software is ~0. I'm not arguing against paying/donating to FOSS, but I do support the discrete distinction to physical tools.
    - d0liver 9mo ago
      If the tool is saving you a large chunk of time, then why does it matter what's happening in another industry? We seem to be losing a really simple thread here: Pay for things because they present more value to you than you're giving away in payment. Y'all seem to have some notion of what constitutes "fair" payment that you're so attached to that you're willing to shoot yourselves in the foot.

andai 9mo ago

> People build tools that they want to use, then share it with others because it's free to. If the rest of the economy worked like this we would be in full-blown utopia. Post-AGI economics seems to bring cost of production and distribution very close to zero, so this may soon come to pass. Culture might need a minute to catch up though!

oblio 9mo ago
> Post-AGI economics seems to bring cost of production and distribution very close to zero, so this may soon come to pass. Culture might need a minute to catch up though! People on HN read too much SciFi.

com2kid 9mo ago

Back when MSDN subscriptions where a thing and people still used Visual Studio, the tools were a lot better. Debuggers worked and did impressive things (time travel debugging! Rewind your entire program state! Step through from your website code all the way to your database queries within the same debugging session! Easily debug remote servers!). Developer documentation was professionally written and edited. Now everything is free and we get what we pay for.

behnamoh 9mo ago

> The highest quality tools in the software development space tend to be FOSS LLMs are also software and OSS (let alone FOSS ones) aren't even close to the quality of closed models like GPT 5.2 or Opus 4.5.

g-b-r 9mo ago
LLMs are more money thrown at their training than software development, and you need prohibitive costly hardware to run the biggest ones. Calling some "OSS" is simply misleading.

xmprt 9mo ago

Very true. On immich, I've always wanted a way to do certain operations locally like adding to an album before the photo/video is fully uploaded, but I'm not frustrated that it's not possible because if I cared enough I'd create a pull request. For features that Google Photos is/was missing, I'm not as generous.

bilekas 9mo ago

> People build tools that they want to use, then share it with others because it's free to. If the rest of the economy worked like this we would be in full-blown utopia. But the rest of the economy doesn't work like this, so support your OSS projects financially.