Comment by wavephorm | Hacker News Reader

Comment by wavephorm | Hacker News Reader

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  I think that's demonstrably false given how good development tools actually are

No. Development tools seriously suck. Show me an IDE that can debug multi-client websocket code. Good luck. Every open source IDE's like Eclipse are useless these days because they can no longer keep up with the new problems being introduced.

Light Table is maybe the first genuinely new, commercial, development environment to be introduced. People are gushing over the possibilities. All of a sudden people might, for the first time in 15 years, be willing to pay real money to make their lives easier.

The open source model is a socialist model that has failed to keep up with the pace of technological change, and encourages developers to not purchase development tools which slows innovation in development technologies. FOSS ultimately holds back innovation.

You speak of light table, but that specific project wouldn't have existed without clojure which uses the eclipse license; doesn't this make it a derivative of open source?

Furthermore, ibdknox open sources the majority of his projects...

How can you reconcile with this information? It seems to me that most of the interesting software coming out these days is a product of the open source movement, rather than an attempt to escape from it.

You seem to ignore the fact that open-source allows more people to use a product. When more people use it, more activity happens - which leads to evolution.

Not sure how you can ignore the open-source software that rules the software development world.

More people using a product does not lead to innovation. It leads to more people using the same free product and not realizing how much better their tools could be if they were willing to pay for them.

Open source tools rule the world simply because they are free, and developers everywhere are unwilling to pay for better tools, which hold back innovation of better tools. Why would anyone build a substantially better development tool if nobody will buy it?

Conflating FOSS to socialism is patently absurd (FOSS is very monetizable and comes in many different forms that you can incorporate into many different business models) and an attempt to co-opt a very negative "red baiting" sentiment in others.

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