This is partly because in English we literally lack the word required. Free is both “gratis” and “libre”. Software should be free, but software does not need to be free.
The lack of distinction on this term plagues the English speaking world in more ways than frugal programmers. See: the entire political spectrum in the US
The industry has come up with a few phrases for this
"Free as in beer" you get something, you don't have to pay.
"Free as in speech" you have the rights to do things, like modify source code.
and later
"Free as in puppies" As in you get it for free, but it's gonna cost you later. Most open source software is like this, you get it, but have to invest is using/mastering/maintaining it. Of course, you have to invest like this in paid, software as well.
Well it's hard to add a new word to mean either "gratis" or "libre" in english because free would still mean both things.
But to be more clear:
Free as in "gratis" is like "buy one get one free". It means something provided at no cost - ie: "They had a problem with their computer system so they gave me the salad for free"
Free as in "libre" is like "freedom", a more abstract concept about being not being restricted from something or having the right to something.
Software can be "free as in libre", ie: it's open-source. It can also be "free as in gratis" in that it costs no money. But they're different concepts, and have different implications.
Many developers want software to be "free", as in open-source, and confuse that with "I will allocate no resources towards that thing".
I particularly like the "free as in beer", which is a HIGHLY confused term, but I take it to mean: Beer itself is free - it's not patented and anyone can learn to make it. However, any individual beer is a product that took effort to produce, and thus, is not free of charge.
I think it makes sense in the "beer is tangible" and "speech is not" sense (to my brain anyway). If I saw a "free beer" sign in a window I'd probably be inclined to think (albeit suspiciously) that there might be a frosty mug inside at no cost to me. Whereas if I saw a "free speech" sign, I'd assume they support my right to say whatever I want (or I suppose maybe that there's a lecture going on inside with no admittance fee).
We all got different brains though, shoutout learning from others perspectives, ty for sharing yours.
I’m paying about €200/year for Jetbrains Toolbox. This gives me a set of IDEs, one of which I’m using daily. And that’s less money than ChatGPT is asking.
Yeah but JetBrains isn't writing your code for you. This is a whole other level of technology that you cannot compare to something that exists already.
I'm intrigued by ChatGPT as a work assistance tool. I have found it useful a number of times. But there's no way it's adding a contours $20/month of value to my day when I compare it to other things on which I spend my money. I'd rather just not have it than spend that much.
$20 one time fee? Maybe. $20/mo? Not at all.
This is no different than streaming media services. There are streaming apps where I'd like to see their content, but not the rate they charge I don't find worth the value. So I don't subscribe.
The Chinese version would have to complies with party guidelines, so not for me. But I am curious what sort of service Microsoft will offer when this will be integrated in Bing. Or the Google's version.
I think so but I wanted some of the paid features. Even still, if you look at the costs it's NOTHING. Lets just say it's $400/year. That comes out to about $1.5 a day. I'm earning at that time $284 per day.
It probably reduced my work stress by 20% so this was incredibly cheap. And even then I used that license for 2 years, so it was really 75 cents a day. Developers will spend $5 on a bagel but not $5 a day for tools, it's pretty wild
> Developers will spend $5 on a bagel but not $5 a day for tools, it's pretty wild
That's because savings-due-to-tools don't scale but rental does.
I can all but guarantee that you're using, daily, some tool that is free. Why aren't you paying $5 a day for it?
You've gotten more value out of bash, grep and related tools than IntelliJ is ever worth to you, and yet if I came up to you and said "here, use my replacement grep, bash, etc for only $5/day" you'd laugh.
Developers who aren't using the expensive tools aren't cheapskate like you assume; they're simply too tired to want or need another rental, because the marginal increase in time savings won't be noticed by them.
> I can all but guarantee that you're using, daily, some tool that is free. Why aren't you paying $5 a day for it?
Because nobody has been crafty enough to capitalize on that market, or is unable to provide a sufficiently convincing alternative that would attract people to it.
For example, I can get by with something like mRemoteNG for tabbed SSH sessions: https://mremoteng.org/
It's kind of quirky but works. Someone else might appreciate something like the excellent MobaXTerm more, which adds multi-execution capabilities, a GUI for port forwarding and much more: https://mobaxterm.mobatek.net/
Sometimes free tools also become paid, see Docker Desktop (for business) or something like Lens: both are proof that, it feeling like a rug pull aside, many people will pay for what even was formerly a free tool.
On a more positive note, this is why Open collective, GitHub Sponsors and other crowd funding solutions are nice, since now you can throw money towards whatever projects you support and think deserve to exist.
> You've gotten more value out of bash, grep and related tools than IntelliJ is ever worth to you, and yet if I came up to you and said "here, use my replacement grep, bash, etc for only $5/day" you'd laugh.
Someone might laugh, but there's a project out there that attempts to commercially create a terminal replacement: https://www.warp.dev/
Many would find the idea offensive (such a core part of their interaction with the computer having paid aspects), but that's just the world that we live in. Not all IDEs are free. Not all OSes are free. You don't even own software nowadays, more often you just rent it. If there is profit to be made, someone will make it.
I think that the free software movement has its nice aspects, but people will absolutely pay for whatever makes their lives easier or more pleasant.
> For example, I can get by with something like mRemoteNG for tabbed SSH sessions: https://mremoteng.org/
> It's kind of quirky but works. Someone else might appreciate something like the excellent MobaXTerm more, which adds multi-execution capabilities, a GUI for port forwarding and much more: https://mobaxterm.mobatek.net/
...
> Someone might laugh, but there's a project out there that attempts to commercially create a terminal replacement: https://www.warp.dev/
But here's the rub - all those people whining about how cheapskate developers are because they don't want to shell out $5/day for ChatGPT/IntelliJ/Whatever aren't deriding people who are not using these paid for replacements.
It's only ever the people using IDEA or Visual Studio or similar who develop superiority complexes over their choice of rentals.
I mean, $5/day to save my employer (not me) 5m/day is a good deal for my employer. I, however, don't get the value of that 5m[1].
[1] Which is why I pay for the IDEA IDE in my personal capacity even though I won't use it at work. Because if they save 5m/day, I get that time saved. Luckily my current (and last three or four) employers had no hesitation in purchasing software we wanted, so I never had to use it at work.
> But here's the rub - all those people whining about how cheapskate developers are because they don't want to shell out $5/day for ChatGPT/IntelliJ/Whatever aren't deriding people who are not using these paid for replacements.
> It's only ever the people using IDEA or Visual Studio or similar who develop superiority complexes over their choice of rentals.
Hmm, that's an interesting point, though I feel that sometimes we forget two aspects of software development (or also game development, to take a popular hobby as an example as well):
- developing software (and games, too) is hard and takes a lot of time and resources of all kinds, more so than most people realize
- many of these projects are only ever profitable (or even sustainable) because of being able to attract large audiences
Sometimes I'm stunned at indie games that are sold at 10 - 20$ and people are still up in arms about it being "too much", when the drink or meal that they enjoyed didn't take thousands of hours to create (although possibly is only cheap because of subsidies for certain ingredients, but that's besides the point), whereas software or a game did. The same goes for developers that want all of their software to be free, as if it should fund itself, albeit I also appreciate the free software movement.
It's more visible when you see post-mortems about how much indie creators struggle even if the projects themselves are well made: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qUsuusNLxik (first example that jumped in mind), though I'm sure that it happens to a lot of startups out there as well, that end up folding.
With that in mind, I can almost understand why people would be a bit upset that a demographic that's generally reasonably well off (developers) scoff at products that seem reasonably priced, especially when considering how much work has gone into them. Though personally, I think a bit more kindness could go around even then.
Organizations being too spending-conservative and not wanting to invest into tools that would both improve productivity and reduce stress is just puzzling (if you don't just explain it with ignorance, or greed).
Idk why but programmers are the cheapest people on earth in regards to programming tools.
I bought Intellij idea for $400 like 12 years ago and got made fun of at work even though it made me substantially faster than eclipse.