Clarification: I’m referring to companies that pay developers, professionally. I understand why a “hobby” or “for fun” developer wouldn’t want to (or couldn’t afford) a fully-features pay tool, and may prefer to tinker. I’m talking about situations where a deadline is bearing down on a developer/company and development time is diverted away from the goal in pursuit of a “Free” tool to accomplish what a pay one is available to do.
I’ve noticed a number of Stack Overflow questions recently (they’re not new, I’ve just recently taken notice) where people are searching for free alternatives to popular development tools for things like ALM, database comparison, and other functions for which there’s a trivially costly pay alternative. The “Free” tag on Stack Overflow has 350 questions, and it doesn’t take long to see dozens of examples of “Is there a FREE tool to do X?” followed by discussions that must have taken the asker hours to research and participate in.
It’s not just about paying less – I’m often amazed at the hoops that some developers (or, perhaps more accurately, their companies) will go through to avoid paying for something – in some cases, a pay solution will be avoided in favor of a poorly documented, buggy, feature-incomplete open-source solution that results in dozens of hours of work that could have been avoided.
I understand the most obvious reasons:
- Company is short on cash
- Don’t pay for something when a (functionally-comparable) free alternative is available
- “Hobby” developers don’t have the cash to spare, and since they’re just learning, it doesn’t make sense to pay for a toolset they’re only tinkering with
However, I think the “short on cash” reasoning is completely bogus – as a developer not long out of college, I made about $50K annually, or $200/day (meaning my company probably paid close to $300/day to have me in my chair, all considered). When you compare that price to a $300 tool, the obvious answer is “if it’s going to waste more than a day of your time, you should buy it instead and get back to work”. However, that’s not what I observe – people seem willing to kill dozens of hours to avoid paying for something that only costs $50.
Help me understand – as a developer myself of tools I’d like to one day sell, I want to understand the mentality. Have I been spoiled by working at a company that’s not afraid to spend? Is there an ingrained reason developers (or their companies) don’t want to spend money? Can people not accurately estimate the costs of “Free” tools in terms of lost productivity?
I’m not referring to instances where a great free alternative is available. For example, any of these tools is a great example of something you shouldn’t pay for. However, let’s say one of those lacks a key feature you need, and which a pay version of the same library provides – people seem to lean towards hacking around with the free version to add the needed functionality (or scaffold in the needed functionality) instead of ditching the free tool in favor of the pay (and feature-complete) version. I’m not saying that’s the wrong choice, but it’s just a choice I want to understand the reasoning to. The important point is that I’d like to – my intent is not to be argumentative.
What you’re not considering are Dependencies and Partnerships.
It’s great when companies announce “Partnerships”, their marketing and legal teams spend ages wording contracts and press briefings that basically announce “We’re now joined at the hip!”.
What you may not realise, is that every time you choose to use a 3rd party tool you are tying yourself to that company, unlike a partnership the dependancy only goes one way (like the Marketing and Legal blurb).
What happens if they decide to cancel the product?
Or they change how it works, and suddenly it’s not compatible with how you are using it?
Or they double their yearly developer licence?
Here we use lots of open source tools, while there is only “community level support” and the ramp up time may be longer than for an off the shelf tool, we consider that worth the price we’re paying.
We are part of that community. If a version is released that breaks our software, we have choices, we can continue with the version we’re using, and choose to maintain that version our selves. Or we can participate in the project and patch the code so it will continue to work for us.
If the open source project falls by the way side, we’re still left with access to the source code, so we can continue to build and maintain that too if we wish.
We believe going open source gives us far more freedom than tying ourselves to other companies, who can (and do) change their pricing policies.
Cost-per-developer next year could be twice what it is this year. Changing to a different product could equally cost as much or more.
My two cents.