I still wonder why people do this. Build an end-user product and give it away for free.
It’s just making our work look worthless and kills small software companies.
Cool, share your library or web server, as it allows others to build products around this and you will benefit from theirs. But consumer products? Why are we so cheap? Will we do just anything for „likes” and „internet points”?
> I still wonder why people do this. Build an end-user product and give it away for free.
If you don't intend to monetize it at all (or don't think you can), there are other potential benefits:
◌ People using it can draw their attention to your other output.
◌ People using it can be a free testing resource, finding bugs before they affect your own use of the software. They can also be a time sink due to support requests, so this can be a delicate balance.
◌ People using it can be a source of improvement ideas that you have not thought of but which are useful to you once identified.
> It’s just making our work look worthless
Only if the sole way you judge worth is financial income.
> and kills small software companies.
Sometimes this is a deliberate part of the equation, when a large company opens some of their product(s), but usually not.
If your company is surviving on selling a relatively small end-user product like this then you are in danger from other small companies doing the same anyway, even ignoring any F/OSS options, and need to be competing at least in part on other factors like support, quality, and keeping up with changes in the industry (or your users' industry if that differs) so your product stays relevant and useful.
Open source and gratis doesn't make our work look worthless.
First, money ≠ value.
And even when talking about money, look how are valued many open source projects like MariaDB (in the news recently), nginx, WordPress, … - yes, caveat, you mentioned consumer products, those are not all consumer products)
For some of us, it's not about likes or internet points. It's not being cheap. It's about giving the users the rights they deserve. It can be about efficient cooperation (here, it's not about this). It's also becoming a requirement in some contexts and places.
There are business models around open source software. There are other ways to make money with software than to sell proprietary software licenses.
Of course money != value, but don't pretend that REST client is charity or fight for freedom or something. It's a wrench. And wrench should have its price on the shelf.
Unfortunately most business models around free software are ads and user profiling. Rest is just noise.
The wrench analogy doesn't work because when downloading a copy of the software, you don't make the original vanish. A copy costs nothing. There are also costs associated to software maintenance that don't apply to the wrench. Software has its own characteristics.
But I think I get the essence of your remark, and that would be that work needs to be paid. I mostly agree (I agree "enough" to carry on anyway), more on that later.
> Unfortunately most business models around free software are ads and user profiling. Rest is just noise.
That's unfortunate but not an inevitability. You don't need to rely on ads for revenue. It's not because many businesses decided that it's okay to spy on their users and steal their time and attention that you are forced to do the same.
The projects I mentioned don't make money through ads. Other big projects are like that as well. WordPress and Nextcloud for instance both have different business models that don't rely on ads. I work for XWiki SAS, we also don't rely on ads. There are ways. You can even sell "licenses" for open source software. We do that (and it's not open core), although I think you complained more about the gratis aspect than the open source aspect. We also make money with consulting, support and hosting.
> don't pretend that REST client is charity or fight for freedom or something
I don't see what you mean. If I'm to rely on some tool, I want to be able to control it and proprietary software doesn't allow me this. So I won't use a rest client if it's proprietary. And I wish this also for my users.
Yeah, maybe I've got too old-school thinking. Or maybe just worked on too many failed startups :). But the overall cheapness of our industry is driving me crazy.
I happily use proprietary software - IntelliJ, Sublime, Affinity, MacOS, etc. In my experience if you get software for free, you are the product, or you will be charged x10 more when they finally get their "business model".
- if it's free software you use locally (or SaaS you know you can self host), you should be able to keep using it even if the business model changes (which can happen in the proprietary world, see Adobe for a spectacular example). If the software is popular enough, there's some chance the thing will be forked and maintained by somebody else. Of course, no guarantees on this. I strongly prefer local software for this reason.
- you should definitely look at the business model of whoever builds your software. If it burns investor money or runs on ads, it's not good, for the reasons you mentioned.
- paid software is not a guarantee against your concerns. I already mentioned Adobe, windows is also full of ads and spying nowadays. VMWare and Confluence also have fucked their customers quite hard on pricing recently. Actually, I quite strongly distrust proprietary software seeing how common these things seem to happen in the proprietary world and there's no "someone is going to fork it" backup plan.
MacOS isn't without issues neither. It forces you to login for software upgrades and to access the app store (that's tracking in my book), and it's game over when Apple stops supporting your hardware. Its proprietary nature pretty much guarantees nobody will take over. Perfectly good hardware becomes insecure or waste unless its owner decides to replace the OS with Linux. Which isn't possible on iPads and iPhone.
On my end, I haven't had bad surprises so far. Ubuntu has been a bit worrying but I've been using something else for years now. The biggest concern for me today is Firefox. The strictly open source nature of the repositories from which I install Firefox is a first "safeguard".
My software is largely sponsored by companies selling support, they have an incentive to make sure it keeps working. It is so good that I can install the latests versions on 15-20 year old hardware.
Yeah, exactly because of that we have no nice tools for devs. All is built either to get a better job (and then abandoned) or you cannot sell it (and then you abandon it). If we were not that cheap maybe we would have more Jetbrains like companies.
Every company is replaceable.
I just don’t see doctors or lawyers giving away their work for free. They are just smarter than us.
I just don’t see doctors or lawyers giving away their work for free. They are just smarter than us.
"For free" does a lot of heavy lifting here. Of the members of each field, only a fraction of these professionals are doing primary discovery & research in their area of expertise. The rest of them are leveraging the completed research/studies/trials/precedents of others from their fields, in some topics decades worth of it.
This is the first thing I looked for on the website, FYI - any indication of what the long term plan for Yaak is. It might be worthwhile to put a note of "cloud sync coming soon" or something, or maybe I'm an outlier and it doesn't matter.
It’s just making our work look worthless and kills small software companies.
Cool, share your library or web server, as it allows others to build products around this and you will benefit from theirs. But consumer products? Why are we so cheap? Will we do just anything for „likes” and „internet points”?