Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well none of the solutions mentionned are open source. Free as in beer is one incentive as licenses are not cheap, and vendors know when they have you locked down and tend to milk everything they can. More importantly, software for which we don't have control over the source is a risk. In this day and age anyone that cares enough should be able to push a bugfix/hotfix overnight. What if you'd have to wait for entire…
"Free as in beer is one incentive as licenses are not cheap, and vendors know when they have you locked down and tend to milk everything they can." Free as in beer is never the answer. A project like this takes multiple engineer-years to build and maintain. That's hundreds of thousands of dollars, at least. How much is a site license? Are you sure? Have you negotiated the rate? Even for "expensive" services, buying i…
This is why you never try to target developers and if you do, you have to make sure the initial cost to use it is negligible. This is what Atlassian does very well, with their pricing structure.
In the past, I developed in house tools for massive Enterprise companies and the common theme has always been, we can do it better and cheaper. Sometimes that's true, sometimes it's not. I noticed this trend slowly tapering off before I left to start my startup and this was due to the availability of better open source solutions.
Technical people always overestimate what they are capable of, present company included, and if you are set on selling to developers, you have to make sure the barrier to use is negligible. By at least trying, they will either come to the conclusion that what you have created is a piece of shit or they realize it's not worth their time and effort to duplicate/maintain.