Comment by ketzu | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ketzu | Hacker News Reader

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I would have expected it is much more:

* Most developers start to learn at a time where they don't have the money for tools.

* If the free solution is good enough, there is little motivation to invest in higher grade tools.

* If there are "good enough" free tools, the market is very small for a paid solution so the price has to be high.

Developers tending to read code to understand a tool or even improve it, is a very rare case in my experience, which is limited to mostly computer science students and some researchers though.

There are many reasons why I don't do it myself, e.g., code of many projects is hard to read and takes a lot of time, implementation only losely helps me understand the tool besides edge cases where it doesn't do what I want, I am interested in solving a problem with the tool instead of understanding the tool.

>* Most developers start to learn at a time where they don't have the money for tools.

There is even more to this point. Most programmers still like to work on some personal projects here and there, and they don't like to have a completely different workflow at work and at home. Plus they usually have multiple devices (desktop PC, laptop) or even multiple VMs and in the past licensing wasn't really compatible with these kinds of scenarios, and you'd often have to purchase the software 5 times.

Not to mention it is annoying when you sit in front of a new device and you can't just install your tools and instead have to think about how you're going to transfer or apply your license.

> in the past licensing wasn't really compatible with these kinds of scenarios, and you'd often have to purchase the software 5 times.

That is only because of greed. During the 80s and 90s, Borland for example had a "no-nonsense license agreement" that told you to treat the software as a book: make as many copies as you want, have as many users as you want and even resell it as long as - like a book - only one person at a time is using it.

They did change it at some point in the 2000s, probably around the time when they stopped selling Delphi for $99 as the cheapest option, introduced online DRM and prices skyrocketed to the thousands.

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