> I can all but guarantee that you're using, daily, some tool that is free. Why aren't you paying $5 a day for it?
Because nobody has been crafty enough to capitalize on that market, or is unable to provide a sufficiently convincing alternative that would attract people to it.
For example, I can get by with something like mRemoteNG for tabbed SSH sessions: https://mremoteng.org/
It's kind of quirky but works. Someone else might appreciate something like the excellent MobaXTerm more, which adds multi-execution capabilities, a GUI for port forwarding and much more: https://mobaxterm.mobatek.net/
Sometimes free tools also become paid, see Docker Desktop (for business) or something like Lens: both are proof that, it feeling like a rug pull aside, many people will pay for what even was formerly a free tool.
On a more positive note, this is why Open collective, GitHub Sponsors and other crowd funding solutions are nice, since now you can throw money towards whatever projects you support and think deserve to exist.
> You've gotten more value out of bash, grep and related tools than IntelliJ is ever worth to you, and yet if I came up to you and said "here, use my replacement grep, bash, etc for only $5/day" you'd laugh.
Someone might laugh, but there's a project out there that attempts to commercially create a terminal replacement: https://www.warp.dev/
Many would find the idea offensive (such a core part of their interaction with the computer having paid aspects), but that's just the world that we live in. Not all IDEs are free. Not all OSes are free. You don't even own software nowadays, more often you just rent it. If there is profit to be made, someone will make it.
I think that the free software movement has its nice aspects, but people will absolutely pay for whatever makes their lives easier or more pleasant.
> For example, I can get by with something like mRemoteNG for tabbed SSH sessions: https://mremoteng.org/
> It's kind of quirky but works. Someone else might appreciate something like the excellent MobaXTerm more, which adds multi-execution capabilities, a GUI for port forwarding and much more: https://mobaxterm.mobatek.net/
...
> Someone might laugh, but there's a project out there that attempts to commercially create a terminal replacement: https://www.warp.dev/
But here's the rub - all those people whining about how cheapskate developers are because they don't want to shell out $5/day for ChatGPT/IntelliJ/Whatever aren't deriding people who are not using these paid for replacements.
It's only ever the people using IDEA or Visual Studio or similar who develop superiority complexes over their choice of rentals.
I mean, $5/day to save my employer (not me) 5m/day is a good deal for my employer. I, however, don't get the value of that 5m[1].
[1] Which is why I pay for the IDEA IDE in my personal capacity even though I won't use it at work. Because if they save 5m/day, I get that time saved. Luckily my current (and last three or four) employers had no hesitation in purchasing software we wanted, so I never had to use it at work.
> But here's the rub - all those people whining about how cheapskate developers are because they don't want to shell out $5/day for ChatGPT/IntelliJ/Whatever aren't deriding people who are not using these paid for replacements.
> It's only ever the people using IDEA or Visual Studio or similar who develop superiority complexes over their choice of rentals.
Hmm, that's an interesting point, though I feel that sometimes we forget two aspects of software development (or also game development, to take a popular hobby as an example as well):
- developing software (and games, too) is hard and takes a lot of time and resources of all kinds, more so than most people realize
- many of these projects are only ever profitable (or even sustainable) because of being able to attract large audiences
Sometimes I'm stunned at indie games that are sold at 10 - 20$ and people are still up in arms about it being "too much", when the drink or meal that they enjoyed didn't take thousands of hours to create (although possibly is only cheap because of subsidies for certain ingredients, but that's besides the point), whereas software or a game did. The same goes for developers that want all of their software to be free, as if it should fund itself, albeit I also appreciate the free software movement.
It's more visible when you see post-mortems about how much indie creators struggle even if the projects themselves are well made: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qUsuusNLxik (first example that jumped in mind), though I'm sure that it happens to a lot of startups out there as well, that end up folding.
With that in mind, I can almost understand why people would be a bit upset that a demographic that's generally reasonably well off (developers) scoff at products that seem reasonably priced, especially when considering how much work has gone into them. Though personally, I think a bit more kindness could go around even then.
Organizations being too spending-conservative and not wanting to invest into tools that would both improve productivity and reduce stress is just puzzling (if you don't just explain it with ignorance, or greed).
Because nobody has been crafty enough to capitalize on that market, or is unable to provide a sufficiently convincing alternative that would attract people to it.
For example, I can get by with something like mRemoteNG for tabbed SSH sessions: https://mremoteng.org/
It's kind of quirky but works. Someone else might appreciate something like the excellent MobaXTerm more, which adds multi-execution capabilities, a GUI for port forwarding and much more: https://mobaxterm.mobatek.net/
Sometimes free tools also become paid, see Docker Desktop (for business) or something like Lens: both are proof that, it feeling like a rug pull aside, many people will pay for what even was formerly a free tool.
On the opposite side of the spectrum, you have developers that can't capitalize on their software and the projects aren't sustainable: https://staltz.com/software-below-the-poverty-line.html
On a more positive note, this is why Open collective, GitHub Sponsors and other crowd funding solutions are nice, since now you can throw money towards whatever projects you support and think deserve to exist.
> You've gotten more value out of bash, grep and related tools than IntelliJ is ever worth to you, and yet if I came up to you and said "here, use my replacement grep, bash, etc for only $5/day" you'd laugh.
Someone might laugh, but there's a project out there that attempts to commercially create a terminal replacement: https://www.warp.dev/
Many would find the idea offensive (such a core part of their interaction with the computer having paid aspects), but that's just the world that we live in. Not all IDEs are free. Not all OSes are free. You don't even own software nowadays, more often you just rent it. If there is profit to be made, someone will make it.
I think that the free software movement has its nice aspects, but people will absolutely pay for whatever makes their lives easier or more pleasant.