Even at my school, I don't remember a single student paying for any software. Teachers were obviously aware of that and while they didn't encourage piracy openly, when they showed something on a high priced software, "go ahead and get the cracked version if you don't already have it" was almost implied.

We also worked with Linux and free software a lot, that's just to say that price never was an issue, because we didn't pay.

It is debatable but I think publisher were happy with that situation, students wouldn't pay in any way, they might as well learn on tools that their future employers will have to pay for.

Things have changed. Most notably, the primary way of monetization is online services now. Software is often given away for free and piracy is either pointless (because free software) or much harder (because a large part of it is online).

As for charging for dev tooling, yes, it is hard, because charging for software is hard. That is, unless you have an online service component. That's a reason why "collaborative" tools are so popular now.

Since piracy was/is the norm, you might as well provide a few version.

I was very much a Linux person at the time, but I could still appreciate all the free stuff MS lobbed at students.

The free stack is even catching up where paid software used to excel - modern, usable UI. We're happy to drop a few hundred on donations.

I’d be happy to, and do, pay for some dev tools that I get to own for life. The Jetbrains model is really a great match I think for both the company and the customer.

The real reason Linux took over is Windows just didn’t make a good server. Even if you looked past the bloated footprint, licensing was a nightmare just to figure out what you needed to buy let alone the licensing costs themselves.

Even good dev tools can’t make up for a bad platform.

> Over-monetizing their dev tooling was a significant contributor to Microsoft's loss of dev mind-share over the last decade.

I also don’t really know if this is common: but the individual years of my adult life just seem less real than my childhood for some reason.

- Naming confusion between three completely different products Visual Studio, Visual Studio for Mac, and Visual Studio Code.

- Complete failure to comprehend how old VS's codebase is. "Dotnet Core runs on Linux, right?"

- Most people use about 10% of the functionality it offers. Unfortunately no two users use the same 10% of it's features.

https://developercommunity.visualstudio.com/t/visual-studio-...

The first time I got to work with Linux for money (as opposed for fun at home) was when I had a project where the MS Licensing would cost a lot more than the hardware it would run on.

They let me do it with Redhat, PHP and PostgreSQL. They bought the box from Dell and that was it. No licensing to track or pay. The freedom was just amazing and made business sense.

On the negative-side, the asp.net core team is obsessed with dependency injection and async, which results in tons of shitty boilerplate. So you either have to strike off the beaten path and get nice clean, terse code, but constantly fight the tooling, or accept their dogmatic styling and end up with ridiculously bloated code.

We should enter a world where people pay for open-source. OSS has been fine, but they never had the correct resources for marketing and UX. The should be a paywall for access to repos, even if you could theoretically find the code everywhere else, but ey, want the code updated automatically? $5 per month. (I’m paying 1% revenue for OSS but as long as it’s not everyone, it doesn’t make the developers filthy rich and able to hire UX and marketers, and that is what we need).

What hasn't happened is a culture of offering financial feedback to favored projects.

Patreon and Kickstarters seem a start.

Suggestions are welcome.

So I’m already paying, as you sure have read.

> but as long as it’s not everyone, it doesn’t make the developers filthy rich

You asked for suggestions, it is right there. Ask people to pay for access to the repos, or let them download for free from alternate sources. It will make big businesses pay because they require a chain of custody, while the amateur can still download for free, and it conserves all other advantages of OSS.

I do have a feeling that your comment was adverse, I constantly regret being generous when people talk to me like a thieve anyway, just because I give, but not enough (How much is enough for people like you?). Also, you are possibly trying to solve the problem of freeloaders by having possibly adverse comments, not seeing that I’m trying to solve your same issue of freeloaders by finding an incentive which both conserves all advantages of OSS and still leverage money en masse from larger businesses.

“Assume good faith”; Hanlon's razor applies.

* The customers making serious money off improved developer tools - the kind of customers who'd pay $10,000 per seat for a great developer tool - are big businesses.

* Big businesses basically won't pay for things they can get for free. Oh, they might occasionally sponsor a conference for PR purposes - or even pay for developers implementing features they want - but nobody's paying $10,000 a seat for Eclipse out of the goodness of their heart.

* You might think I'm saying "Well then, closed source tools all the way!" but the tools in other engineering sectors that do manage to extract that much money from companies (SolidWorks, Altium...) have a bunch of problems as well - mostly around user lock-in efforts blocking anyone making compatible tooling.

I disagree. I think the biggest contributor was the loss of Windows as the platform to reach paying customers.

All throughout the 90’s people paid massive amounts of money for Visual Studio and MSDN subscriptions. There was also a huge ecosystem for such things as VBX or OCX controls to simplify development.

Developers easily paid the price for Visual Studio because that was the way to reach paying customers. In addition, Microsoft was very aggressive in giving free copies of Visual Studio to students. My university had a program where you could get access to all of Microsoft’s Operating Systems and Development tools for free through your .edu email account.

Then the web and mobile came, and Windows as the place to reach paying customers faded away.

It's possible to imagine a world where few ever thought to push HTML/CSS/JS to their breaking point to get desktop-like functionality from a website, because developing for the Windows desktop was free and a nice experience.

IMO (based on my limited view; I haven't studied the history) it happened because the market for smart mobile devices enlarged (one could argue Apple basically created the future & the market with iPhones, which Blackberry didn't manage to), Firebug and then Chrome made it easier to develop for the web, and developers found that these tools let them make cross-platform apps from a single codebase, with a much larger audience to go with it too.

Which is why I didn't see it as being an issue of price-point: I don't recall any better alternatives to it, whatever the price. Even if you were willing to shell out $1000+ for software tools, what alternative tools could you have bought to make it nearly as easy to make apps that ran on practically every major platform out there? Your only practical option for language was JavaScript (or if you were really desperate, Java, or I guess Flash), and Firebug and Chrome had (and many say Chrome still has) the best dev tools for JS. I don't see how being more willing to spend money on dev tools would've changed this on the client side.

On the server side, Windows had more to offer (and perhaps ASP.NET was a decent alternative), and prices probably mattered a ton there. But that's not primarily about dev tools, that's about the Linux being free and Windows Server very much not.

Note that Android chose Java, not for its performance on constrained devices, but for... developers.

I really can't see how to tell how plausible this is, that MS Phone could have won, through better long-term strategy, of free dev tools.

They didn't have any market share though, so there wasn't much money to be made making apps for them. I suspect they failed because they launched 2-3 years after Android and iPhone, so the other platforms had accumulated the network effects of an existing user base and app ecosystem that they couldn't catch up to. And they tried hard, IIRC, Microsoft offered to build a Snapchat client for Snap Inc, and to pay them to be allowed to do so, but were denied.

Apple managed to claw its position out of pure first-mover-advantage, and it's choice to build on top of a proprietary API. Had they gone with some HTML/js morass, it would have been easily dogged down and ground to dust on the interoperability battlefield.

Microsoft could wrestle Android out of Google's hands though... I mean, why not spinning their own Microsoft-oriented build around AOSP?

Actually, initially Apple expected people to deploy apps as webapps and provide links on the homescreen. There was no ios SDK. Only after a lot of loud complaining by devs did Apple release any tools or an SDK for ios native apps.

If you were graduating and thinking MFC or Java you just had to look at the price of the bookshelf of books required to get anywhere with the former and have some second thoughts.

It is quite telling how Swing got its fame.

It does work when you needs something light weight - but it often craps out on large projects - ironically it slows down way more than the IDEs. For example I'm writing a Flutter/Dart project ATM - the VS code plugin becomes unusable after a while of working on the project even on a relatively small ~30kloc project. IDEA works just fine and has much better tools.

This statement kind of misses the point: it's not that 'VS Code is an IDE', rather it's that the value of an IDE may not be as much as what some think it is.

I would have made the same conclusion a decade ago, but with sufficient plugin/ability ... I have come to prefer VS Code along with many others and have little reason to go back to using an IDE.

That's not to deny the IDE uses case - for specific kinds of projects it's fine, but there's no doubt VS Code - a non-IDE - is picking up in an a ton of areas wherein traditionally and IDE would have been a first choice.

And like I said it often craps out on autocomplete alone with larger code bases for me (had this happen in Dart and C#)

It's the perfect IDE/editor for JS/Typescript - the rest is subpar.

I use VSCode on a project that's about 3* that right now (not including things like node modules or config) and it's never failed.

Are you sure the problem lies with VSCode rather than the Flutter/Dart plugin?

So in the end the only decent experience I had with it was Typescript and JS.

Compare that to IntelliJ or Visual Studio. If I was mostly doing Web frontend or node I would 100% use vscode. Otherwise I just find it's too unreliable and I don't want to waste productivity energy on it. (I wish it was on IntelliJ level, I would pay for that with vscode remoting possibilities, more than I pay IntelliJ even)

I wonder if that is because VsCode runs on top of Electron

I see people leaving iOS every day for Android, but this people are balanced out by users going the other way.

The same is true, I believe, for JetBrains and VS Code.

The screen space used is highly configurable, but if it wasn't, I'd agree. I don't care about memory or CPU at all.

Maybe it's different for other languages, I mostly do PHP + JS/HTML/CSS, but PHPStorm vs vscode (+ plugins for both) is not even close, and PHPStorm makes me so much more productive and takes so much annoyance out of my day that investing in a beefier machine seems like a small price to pay. I've easily made that money back once a month just because I get more done.

I like vscode, but I pretty much exclusively use it as a text editor and notepad.

Developing with php should feel fast. I feel like phpstorm slows me down. I like sublime, it opens the last project in .5 seconds. For me ctrl-p start typing is usually quicker than scrolling down a tree structure.

I want to use phpStorm daily again but it gives me zend eclipse flashbacks. I wish they offered a light verson.

The Jetbrains stuff really isn't _that_ heavyweight.

It's a shared process, so they're not each taking up resources (I wish that was changeable, since they've had and continue to have some annoying bugs around it).

A Scintilla-based editor is still going to crush it on the resource usage front.

I still use it at work though because we don't have CLion there and that code base does not use CMake, but only because it is just slightly better than plain VIM with some plugins. But compared to CLion + CMake it's just one small step beyond a glorified text editor.