I do not agree. Nothing is free, its just that costs continually get shifted else where into abstraction. If you pay money to advertise your service then you and (others) are all indirectly paying for your software (and others') so you can be able to offer your software 'free'. If you say, choose to monetize by ads.
Really there has not yet emerged an economic model that beats simple old just charge money for it in terms of ease of implementation and use, reliability and path to profitability for someone starting off.
Sell Ads, take a minuscule rent to display ads other people bought, micro-payments, licensing, charging for support (urgh!), free (crippled) version to bait to a paid version are actually all more of the same. Except that all but the last requiring a large amount of traction in activity, reputation, users or both. Something very not easy to get, requiring a much longer runway than is feasible for most.unless they wish to seek investment, which is its own can of worms.
But I do agree, this direct charging is not going to work much longer than this decade I don't think. It is going to be very interesting to see what sort of new economic models evolve to support consumption and greed. These are interesting times. I hope to be part of it.
Actually, so long as I'm writing C++, I greatly prefer QtCreator over XCode. It actually helps me navigate my code, whereas XCode just seems to get in the way.
I'd agree that XCode is the best IDE for writing Objective-C apps for OS X on a Mac... but only because it's in a field of one (as far as I know). In my opinion it's a truly terrible IDE.
If, however, your goal is to deliver a desktop application that runs on Windows, MacOS X and other Unixes, or an app that runs on Symbian mobile phones, VS is worst than useless.
> .NET/VS.NET is one of the best programming environments ever engineered
What you're doing is when somebody claims "trains are more energy efficient than cars" then you say "but not if you run a train on a road"/"you can't run a train on a road". This is true but that was not the claim, the claim is clearly about the productivity a programmer has with the tools for developing applications for the platforms that the respective tools are targeting.
And you can build applications that run on OS X and Linux with VS.
It would be every bit as pretty as driving a train over a road...
VS is a space shuttle. Very complex, very impressive and with a very limited usage. To its credit and unlike the shuttle, it can do one thing very well.
It all depends on your priorities. If all you do is write Windows software, VS is the best. If what you do is web apps that will run on Unix-like servers on platforms like J2EE, Django, Rails, Flask or anything like it, you can tweak it until it becomes barely usable. Of course, only as long as you conform yourself to running your workstation on an environment profoundly different from what the app will run on production.
Priorities matter. I wouldn't use a Formula 1 race car to launch a satellite, regardless of how much they are impressive vehicles. Compared to what it takes to launch a satellite, they are, really, quite unimpressive.
Not at all true. Setting up VS to work with Qt isn't too hard. And once you've got it set up it's a perfectly fine tool for writing cross platform Qt apps. Then to build and test you just do some clever stuff with virtual machines and you are good to go.
Surely ye jest.
There's more startups charging consumers now than anytime I can remember. It used to be that unless your startup was retail based, it was free. Those days are gone.
I'm serious. The market changed. You can no longer sell a C compiler, a desktop operating system or an e-mail client. You can sell a lot of stuff.
And don't call me Shirley.
The bad news is that small companies cannot do that easily - they typically rely on a single product/service that they need to charge people for, like any traditional business out there.
Same with app stores - they are pretty much forcing 3rd party devs to give away or sell for pennies. Sure, we get this occasional story of a successful mobile product, but the truth is for each success there are tens of thousands of apps making close to nothing.
This, for me, is NOT a good trend for software startups. The whole "free" movement make it exceedingly hard to sell software nowadays.
Most probably because...
> .NET/VS.NET is one of the best programming environments ever engineered
... simply isn't true.
Unless you are saying it's one of the 10.000 best programming environments ever engineered or that others, like Smalltalk/80, Genera, Interlisp, Turbo Pascal, the NeXT toolset, Zope, Rails, Django were "grown" rather than engineered. I agree VS is and has consistently been the best single IDE when you are using Windows to write software that runs on Windows, but it fails miserably out of its narrow domain (however deep it is, as it accounts for a huge market share). It's much like Xcode being the best IDE for using an Apple computer to write software that runs on Apple computers. It certainly is.
Microsoft deserves some recognition, for many times they delivered what the market needed. From its very first BASIC interpreter, to Windows, to Windows for Workgroups, to the first affordable alternative to Unix on RISC boxes (NT, for those too young to remember), to Visual Basic (the only language many corporate developers ever knew) they more or less set the tone of the entire PC industry.
As for charging money for software, the market changed. It's like complaining you can no longer sell ice blocks because everybody owns a refrigerator or that you don't sell as many carriages as you once did because people prefer cars. Embrace the change, use the tools and help build them into even more impressive ones (from the list I showed in the first "real" paragraph, 4 have always either been open-source or have a direct descendant that is). You can use them for free, you can build on them and you can improve them so they better suit your needs.