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If your effort spent on tools speeds up your time-to-stuff, then the assumptions embodied in 1) are invalid.

Besides, with open source you have more than just the original developer on whom you can use cash to entice him to make your favorite changes.

>If your effort spent on tools speeds up your time-to-stuff, then the assumptions embodied in 1) are invalid.

Effort spent on tools != effort spend on adding some feature I'd like on a programmer's editor. I could just switch to something better.

Plus, you probably overestimate how more productive a tool like a programmer's editor makes you.

The truth is an editor can make editing less repetitive, but it's not like an order of magnitude better. Not even 2x or 3x more productive. Thing is, there are very successful programmers using all kinds of editors, from Emacs and Vim to Eclipse (notch), to Textmate, to Notepad++. And tons of classic unix programs, including C and Unix itself, were written in ed or similar primitive editors.

I'm going to be a bit pedantic: switching to another editor is also effort spent. Learning how to use Eclipse, IntelliJ, Visual Studio, Vim, Emacs, ed, etc. etc. Some stuff is simple (text input from a keyboard), but they each have their own weird incompatible little worlds.

Yes, you could, you just choose not to.

Do you know all about batista's personal life, all his responsibilities, all of his schedule? While it is possible that he could do the work and choses not to, I don't think you have enough information to say that he definitely can do it and choses not to. People have to prioritize their lives, and there is only so much time to go around. I for one have a thousand things I'd like to do, but personal time limits and higher priorities prevent me from doing them. Finite resources cannot be made infinite.

You're getting angry about something that you've imagined I've stated when in fact you agree with me.

> People have to prioritize their lives

Yes, totally agree. Prioritisation is inherently about making choices - I'm sure you don't disagree with that?

Don't conflate not wanting to or being unwilling to do something with impossibility. They're very different.

So "enough interest" means someone who's interested enough to overcome those three hurdles.

Sorry, I didn't mean to attack you or anything. I'm just praising the model and abilities of open-source and how much power it gives to the user.

I'm extending this idea of rolling your own code to anything/everything open-source, not just text editors. If you're playing a game, or using a webapp and there's some feature or pain point you want to add... well now writing it yourself is an option!

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying you have to write it because you have a thousand other things to focus on or that the reward/effort ratio isn't worthwhile or whatever reason. But you can.

But you can't tell me that having the option to do so isn't so freaking awesome. Would you prefer abandonware instead? Or seeing where Textmate 2 was going (evidently, nowhere) if it wasn't open-sourced?

>Sorry, I didn't mean to attack you or anything.

Oh, no problem, I didn't get that impression.

>I'm just praising the model and abilities of open-source and how much power it gives to the user.

Well, what I'm tried to say it that much of this is "potential" power and not actual. It takes a community or at least several interested programmers to actualise it. Else, it's just the same as if the user didn't have the option at all.

>But you can't tell me that having the option to do so isn't so freaking awesome. Would you prefer abandonware instead?

No, sure, Open Source is better than closed source abandon-ware. Only pointing it that open source can be abandon-ware too (tons of abandoned projects on SourceForge and GitHub -- and not all for lack of interested users, mainly for lack of interested programmers).

Personally, I think that everyone should have some form of programming chops. If only so people can program in the features that they want/need into the software they use.

That's why I think programmers as users (that can contribute back!) are so beneficial. Heck, they can even help the lead programmer debug by finding stack traces, culprit lines in code, working on things the author can't make time for, etc. etc.

You're right in that it's "potential" power, but I think it's just a matter of time of getting more people into the open-source and contributing mindset. I don't think enough of my coworkers or previous peers from uni respect the power of open-source. They just see open-source software as something... 'fixed'. It's either good, or not. They don't realize that they can easily change it with some determination.

On a sidenote, have you read about the "Cathedral and the Bazaar" [1], by Eric S. Raymond? I thought it was quite an eye-opener on the merits of open-source vs the closed-source alternative.

[1] http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/rt...