This line galled me too as it showed a serious misunderstanding of the principles of libre software. There's a reason we say Free as in Free Speech, not Free Beer! Why would I ever want to make my workflow dependant on a third party blob whose internals are obscure from me?

> There's a reason we say Free as in Free Speech, not Free Beer!

Agree.

A major problem that needs to be solved is creating a user-funded, donation-based model of free software development. The old argument was that copies of free software can be given a price and sold on tapes, thus the distinctions between price and speech - you could potentially support the development of free software by selling copies. But this practice has largely disappeared in the Internet age, and it seems the only business model of free software today is value-added services.

One could argue that free software, by its definition, allows unrestricted, free redistribution (both speech and beer), others can still distribute it for free, so it's meaningless to sell copies. But I would say that many users may still want to pay to support its development if there's a system in place to encourage it. Currently, the visibility of donation in free software remains low.

For example, there's nothing to prevent us from asking for a donation to download on the official website or an "app store", or integrating a payment system on a code hosting platform, or a micropayment system that encourages you to pay $1 for reading some documentation. You can even integrating a micropayment system to a package manager that pays while you are installing something, or even refuse to provide documentation from the official website or support from a package manager unless you've paid, forcing people to either pay or find a 3rd-party's copy, it's ethically questionable but remains valid under the principle of free software), the possibilities are endless.

The only obstacle I see is the lack of a good micropayment system, but it can be solved in principle.

One thing about debugging is that there isn't much lock-in. If you don't like the debugger or it goes away, switching to another debugging approach is very easy. Your workflow doesn't have a hard dependency on it (other than to the extent you enjoy using it).

It's a bit like Github, which also isn't free software, but so many free software projects use it, in part because people think they could easily switch away from it if they wanted to. (I think in practice switching away from Github would far harder than switching debuggers.)

The price does also play a role. Learning tools and frameworks takes a lot of time, and if it's not a free tool then if you change jobs or even departments you might find yourself unable to get a license. If you want to work on stuff at home, you need to pay. If you want to run a test server you need a license. Some tools are better than others in that regard, but it's basically why I would always choose learning a slightly worse free option than a paid option.

Oh i wasn't saying that cost doesn't matter, just that it isn't the only factor.

I would have expected it is much more:

* Most developers start to learn at a time where they don't have the money for tools.

* If the free solution is good enough, there is little motivation to invest in higher grade tools.

* If there are "good enough" free tools, the market is very small for a paid solution so the price has to be high.

Developers tending to read code to understand a tool or even improve it, is a very rare case in my experience, which is limited to mostly computer science students and some researchers though.

There are many reasons why I don't do it myself, e.g., code of many projects is hard to read and takes a lot of time, implementation only losely helps me understand the tool besides edge cases where it doesn't do what I want, I am interested in solving a problem with the tool instead of understanding the tool.

>* Most developers start to learn at a time where they don't have the money for tools.

There is even more to this point. Most programmers still like to work on some personal projects here and there, and they don't like to have a completely different workflow at work and at home. Plus they usually have multiple devices (desktop PC, laptop) or even multiple VMs and in the past licensing wasn't really compatible with these kinds of scenarios, and you'd often have to purchase the software 5 times.

Not to mention it is annoying when you sit in front of a new device and you can't just install your tools and instead have to think about how you're going to transfer or apply your license.

> in the past licensing wasn't really compatible with these kinds of scenarios, and you'd often have to purchase the software 5 times.

That is only because of greed. During the 80s and 90s, Borland for example had a "no-nonsense license agreement" that told you to treat the software as a book: make as many copies as you want, have as many users as you want and even resell it as long as - like a book - only one person at a time is using it.

They did change it at some point in the 2000s, probably around the time when they stopped selling Delphi for $99 as the cheapest option, introduced online DRM and prices skyrocketed to the thousands.

If there were reasonably priced tools like this then I'd definitely pay for them. But this tool is still "contact us for pricing". I contacted UndoDB for pricing a while ago and the minimum was $50k. :/

We aren't going to be nearly as expensive as that. Contact us :-).

> Which means open source tools have an advantage over proprietary tools in addition to price.

In principle proprietary tools could also provide the source.