Frank Sommers
Posts: 2642
Nickname: fsommers
Registered: Jan, 2002
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Re: Future of Commercial Java IDEs
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Posted: Feb 10, 2006 10:24 PM
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I think there's a lot of myth about how open-source and free software uproots businesses providing similar payware. Of course, the keyword here is "similar." And open-source IDEs are different from their payware cousins in at least one respect.
I found that many open-source IDE projects must, by their very nature, be inclusive and provide a more or less general-purpose platform that facilitates contributions from a wider community. A closed-source vendor, however, need be concerned much less with a codebase that lots of people can understand and work with, and can instead focus development efforts on features.
There will always be customers willing to pay a reasonable fee for those features, and even for support. I think it was Scott McNealy who once said that open-source software is free as a puppy is free. There are folks who have real deadlines and financial pressures to get stuff done, and those folks will support a vendor that helps meet those needs with features and a smooth experience.
IntelliJ is a great example of that. I don't know how those guys (or girls) do this, but they best every IDE I have ever tried, and that includes about every Java IDE from the latest Netbeans and Eclipse to the Emacs Java module. I am personally happy to pay a reasonable fee for their product because it saves me time by making me more productive. And that time, in turn, translates back into money.
Perhaps a similar principle applies in other areas of software as well. No matter how much people think Microsoft is a monopolist, most people use their products because those products more or less work as advertised. I personally prefer to use Linux for my daily work (and used Solaris before that), but I shudder at the thought of how many hours I wasted trying various pieces of my laptop to work with Linux. When I boot into Windows, on the other hand, the entire laptop works instantly - wireless, I can hibernate the machine, etc. Is that convenience worth the $150 for the price of Windows? You bet.
I just don't see open-source and "free" software replacing commercial vendors with truly outstanding products. If anything, I see commercial vendors benefiting, because they can incorporate much open-source stuff for free into their warez, and then charge for the convenience of having the whole package work well.
What open-source software is replacing is crappy payware. And for that, we should all be thankful.
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