No, I think it's incumbent on us developers to be more willing to pay for things. We know now that free doesn't really work.

I'm willing to pay if it's on hacker friendly terms, e.g. something similar to the Sublime Text model:

* No sign in/email required

* Works offline

* No subscription

* Updates for 3 years included in price

* Perpetual license for older versions

* License per user, unlimited devices and operating systems, including home/work devices

* License is just a matter of copying a file

* No telemetry/phoning home without explicit opt-in

* No DRM/copy protection

* No root access required

* Works on Linux

Unless something external changes the incentives in the market you aren’t gonna see bits in a box return as a business model any time soon. ARR is the only metric that matters to get you funding, it’s way more expensive to support multiple versions than something evergreen, and you can’t really do per-user unlimited device licensing without a login. You can fake it with per user keys but then someone has to have a login to manage them still and your key is now essentially just a login where self-service password resets can’t be done. Why bother when companies clamor for SSO about a billion times more than they ask for anonymous user accounts?

I'm on the same boat, although I have an additional requirement that disqualifies Sublime Text: I want the software to be source-available. Not necessarily FLOSS, but I want to know that if push comes to shove I can hack the code and recompile the software.

I don't want to have to rely on the devs if I want to tweak something that's not meant to be configurable, or if I need to run the software on some unsupported configuration and it breaks.

Sublime is special. I don't think anything can come close to it.

>> it's incumbent on us developers to be more willing to pay for things.

If it is worthwhile and not freely available, I will certainly pay. There are some great IDEs and tools that fit into this category.

>> We know now that free doesn't really work.

I suppose it depends on your needs, but I find using free tools such as zsh, vim, tmux, linux, and many others very valuable to me.

Yeah this project totally completely baffled me. "Autocomplete for the Terminal". What?? Bash has had fully programmable auto-completion for over 20 years [1] -- and that's just one comparitively bare-bones shell, out of dozens that are all free forever and not spyware.

Watching their demo didn't help either. At most the behavior seems an incremental improvement over what Bash ships with in most distros, and it's not even clearly better than that (IMO worse, I prefer the trailing slash or color-coding that Bash uses to distinguish file/dir properties vs icons). Joke: Is the "perceived need" really just because macOS's default Bash distro has these features disabled?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bash_(Unix_shell)#cite_note-60

It feels like the devs are completely clueless about open source, command line, and modern shell features.

There's so many great projects for bash and zsh add-ons like fzf.

Right: Assuming good faith, this project seems completely backwards.

But if their real product is the telemetry that also ships with it, and they've identified that many newbie developers have a hard time seeing through marketing pages directed at developers (eg like "webscale" stuff from mongodb circa 2010), then it, unfortunately, makes more sense.

Virtually the entirety of my desktop stack and dev tools are OSS. Can you clarify what you mean by "does not work" here?

Free doesn't really work? What do you think about linux, git, emacs, blender, vulkan, etc?