Hacker News Reader

Comment by allwein | Hacker News Reader

You've created a nice little strawman there.

Microsoft offers free versions of their developer tools with the various Visual Studio Express editions and Sql Server Express.

If you're looking into more enterprise-y software, Microsoft offers free time-limited versions of pretty much all their server and productivity software.

View on HN

It's not a straw-man. To get that free version, I've got to go to MSDN, register, jump through a bunch of hoops, download some way-too-big installer, run a long installation process, reboot a couple times.. I mean, not that I would ever think of pirating software from a giant corporation that wouldn't even notice the lost revenue, but bittorrent is only very slightly more work than all of that.

apt-get is a whole different plane of ease. It adds about a 3-second fixed-cost to trying a new tool.

Have you ever actually done it? The process of "fill out a form once," hit the Download button and walk away then come back an hour later to answer a few setup questions with Visual Studio is far from the onerous task you make it seem.

I'm no MS fanboy -- my current side project is PHP/LAMP all the way, but I have made money with their free tools.

And if their stuff doesn't work as expected? "Sorry, you are not paying customer, so buzz off" or "sorry, but not enough paying customers want that fixed. You are minority, your money is worthless, so buzz off". While with Free Software you can have your people fix it, or hire consultant. I don't believe in that Bill Gates' ( http://www.cantrip.org/nobugs.html ) "Microsoft code has no bugs" religious gospel. All software has bugs, except Free one can get fixed.

So if I wanted to I could just download Visual Studio Express for C#, and there's no catch or anything? (That's useful information, I might do it)

Correct. There are free versions of VS for C#, Web, etc.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com