For development tools, we all remember paying for development environments in the 80s and 90s. But then GCC was everywhere, Visual Studio had a usable free ver

For development tools, we all remember paying for development environments in the 80s and 90s. But then GCC was everywhere, Visual Studio had a usable free version, and Borland went up in smoke for various reasons. Platform owners realized that they were in a race to make development as easy and cheap as possible for their platform, except for a few odd cases where that wasn't in the best interests of brand image (game consoles, iOS). Libraries are a different story, but if you look at e.g. C# development tools you'll see that they're subsidized to drive adoption of Windows and SQL server licenses. Java was an attempt to drive people to Sun hardware, and now Oracle is monetizing it with the Ask toolbar (I guess?).