Yesterday I took a few hours and attended an intro to SolidWorks at TechShop Durham. Then today Kent tweeted about how JUnit Max has been faring, and it got me thinking about the state of the business in software for programmers.

For those of you unfamiliar with SolidWorks, it's a 3-D Parametric Modeling program, one of the newer and most popular CAD programs. If you are a fan of the TV Show American Chopper it's the program which Jason Pohl uses to design the bikes. It has been gradually taking over the 3D mechanical CAD market, replacing old leaders like AutoCad and ProEngineer. My main interest is as a hobbyist. I've been very interested in industrial technology since I was a kid, and I like to build scale models. I'd love to have SolidWorks to play with on my own, but it's out of my price range.

SolidWorks is owned by a big corporation Dassault Systems, and it's sold through a network of VARs. Yesterdays session was given by a support engineer from the local VAR. I haven't seen an 'official' price for a license, I think they get negotiated by businesses, but I understand that the cost of a single SolidWorks 'seat' is $5,000 to $10,000 with a yearly maintenance fee of around $1000 which gets you yearly upgrades and other goodies. There's also an 'educational' license which is carefully controlled.

And that price seems well worth it to a lot of companies.

This reminds me of the way the software development tools business used to be. IBM and others got big bucks for development seat licenses for compilers, ides and other tools, sold by salesmen and supported by customer support engineers. One of the reasons Smalltalk had a hard time gaining a foothold was that ObjectWorks and VisualAge licenses were very expensive, even Digitalk Smalltalk which was targeted at the same market as Borland TurboPascal cost a few hundred bucks.

Imagine there was a time when folks actually PAID for compilers for PCs!

Nowadays that model is harder and harder to support. Most of the tools programmers use, at least the programmers I hang with, are open source, and freely available. Every once in a while a program like TextMate will pry €39 or so from a programmer's pocket, but most of us get by living off the fat of the open source land.

Unlike the proverbial shoe maker's children, it's not that we don't have any shoes, we've got all the free shoes we want.

JUnit Max, as I understand it, is an Eclipse plugin which acts as a Java equivalent to Ruby's autotest, except on steroids. While autotest runs the most recently failing test until it passes then runs all of the tests, JUnit Max queues up retests based on how recently they failed. Knowing Kent as I do, I'm sure that it's a great tool, very well crafted, but I'm just not into Java anymore, so I don't have direct experience.

Kent is asking a measly $2 per month for JUnit (at least while it's in its beta version), but judging from his tweet this morning, he's disappointed at the number of takers so far.

I admit it, we programmers tend to be a miserly lot, and a lot of us end up doing a lot of code for the love of it. We might ask for a small fee, or put up a "tip-jar" like the one on the RiCal github page but it doesn't often amount to much monetary reward.

Boy, I wish I could come up with the next SolidWorks!