I still don't get why individual developers are so cheap. It is a paradox.

$35 is nothing. I totally believe in supporting a good product with a very reasonable price.

Compare $35 for Reflector to $800 for TypeMock... $200 for Resharper... $300+ for dotTrace.

If you use something daily, <$50 is nothing... even <$100.

Comparing the price of each tool individually yes. However, if you add them all up then it really starts to be costly if you want to use most of those tools. You are limited in what you can budget for as an individual developer and are forced to look at the marginal cost of each new purchase as well as the opportunity cost of not buying some other tool unrelated to your purchase.

(Just in your example, we are already at $1335 not including the price of Visual Studio itself since the free express edition does not support add-ins such as ReSharper and other productivity tools)

I always assumed SharpDevelop supported VS plugins.

I suspect this is because all the young developers who have the free time and inclination to release their efforts as open source are writing Ruby rather than .NET and Java these days. In a few years, they'll have mortgages and families too and will try to start charging for their work. The wheel goes round.

> this mentality seems like it really does a lot to stifle hobbyist exploration of the platform ...

It definitely does seem to stifle innovation on these platforms. Although if you need to use a bunch of commercial widgets in order to try out an idea, you're probably doing it wrong.

I understand what you're saying, but I don't think it's necessarily accurate. There are lots of people with marriages and families making good money in more open communities. I honestly don't believe the line that ".NET is a professional's community, Ruby et all are just for hobbyists". .NET has been relegated to a professional community because of the buy-in for everything, but it really doesn't have to be that way to make a living writing code.

Speaking as a 27 year-old-married-with-two-kids Rubyist, it's entirely possible to make a living charging for your work and still give away useful tools and libraries. I keep a GitHub account and publish code there, usually under MIT or BSD licenses, and while I don't publish everything I write, I have benefited so much from the open source that others have written that I contribute back to the community where I can, and somehow manage to get the bills paid at the end of the month.

I totally agree with you, and I think the simple explanation is that it starts at the top. You're building software with Microsoft tools on Microsoft platforms. You're in "commercial-land" right out of the gate. You're probably building software at a big company, or for a big company. Paying for software is common, and not a big issue. The cultures are just different.

It's not a reflection of the quality of the software or the quality of the engineers - it's just a fundamentally different culture.