Earlier quoted context omitted.
Good for you. I meant as a general rule of thumb.
You said "fundamentally", not as a rule of thumb :)
Fair point. I should have said broadly.
Skip is now free and open source
161–170 of 235 posts
Re: Skip is now free and open source
#162Earlier quoted context omitted.
The highest quality tools in the software development space tend to be FOSS, because unlike any other field, we are employed in the field that makes the tools our field uses, and distribution and manufacturing costs are zero. People build tools that they want to use, then share it with others because it's free to. If the rest of the economy worked like this we would be in full-blown utopia. Selling software to softwa…
> The highest quality tools in the software development space tend to be FOSS LLMs are also software and OSS (let alone FOSS ones) aren't even close to the quality of closed models like GPT 5.2 or Opus 4.5.
LLMs are more money thrown at their training than software development, and you need prohibitive costly hardware to run the biggest ones.
Calling some "OSS" is simply misleading.
Re: Skip is now free and open source
#163> The plain truth is that developers expect to get their tools free of charge. This is an accurate, but damning indictment of how some of the most highly paid workers on the planet won't pay for tools. Unlike nearly every other profession. Folks, if you can afford it, please pay for quality software, instead of relying on FAANG and VC money to keep the tools going!
That's because open source tools are way better for software developers. I find quirks or bugs or limitations in my tools all the time, and when they are open source I can fix and augment the tools however I want, and I can share those changes with others. I can't do that for closed source software. Now, for most software users it doesn't really matter because they couldn't fix a bug or add a feature anyway. Closed a…
+1. AI agents can also fix minor bugs easily in open source software (it already did in two of the apps I use).
Re: Skip is now free and open source
#164> The plain truth is that developers expect to get their tools free of charge. This is an accurate, but damning indictment of how some of the most highly paid workers on the planet won't pay for tools. Unlike nearly every other profession. Folks, if you can afford it, please pay for quality software, instead of relying on FAANG and VC money to keep the tools going!
I agree. When people bemoan the death of lisp machines and RAD and whatnot, remember that we deserve it. We do not want to invest in good tools and treat "Worse is Better" as some twisted virtue, and then wonder why everything sucks and most developer experience is stuck in 80s-90s technology paradigm. We deserve this.
> We do not want to invest in good tools and treat "Worse is Better" as some twisted virtue, and then wonder why everything sucks and most developer experience is stuck in 80s-90s technology paradigm. We deserve this.
Not terribly surprising that one of the most true comments is at the bottom. The Stockholm syndrome by devs desperately wanting to believe that bad tools are good is insane.
It's not even hard to see why Worse is Better is just worse - among many other tests, you can look at the number of production-grade systems and popular tools written in Perl (virtually non-existent) and bash (literally zero). Empirical evidence strongly contradicts the core value tenets of the ideology.
Re: Skip is now free and open source
#165> The plain truth is that developers expect to get their tools free of charge. This is an accurate, but damning indictment of how some of the most highly paid workers on the planet won't pay for tools. Unlike nearly every other profession. Folks, if you can afford it, please pay for quality software, instead of relying on FAANG and VC money to keep the tools going!
I will never pay for anything intellij again. Not because I don't have the money, not because I prefer everything free like a happy little munchkin, but because I loathe them for creating the best IDE for ruby and keeping it paywalled for 10+ years despite java/kotlin and python editors having community versions. IMO it basically killed the language. Now that ruby is uncommon, they released a community edition like a joke.
Re: Skip is now free and open source
#166Earlier quoted context omitted.
The highest quality tools in the software development space tend to be FOSS, because unlike any other field, we are employed in the field that makes the tools our field uses, and distribution and manufacturing costs are zero. People build tools that they want to use, then share it with others because it's free to. If the rest of the economy worked like this we would be in full-blown utopia. Selling software to softwa…
> People build tools that they want to use, then share it with others because it's free to. If the rest of the economy worked like this we would be in full-blown utopia. Post-AGI economics seems to bring cost of production and distribution very close to zero, so this may soon come to pass. Culture might need a minute to catch up though!
> Post-AGI economics seems to bring cost of production and distribution very close to zero, so this may soon come to pass. Culture might need a minute to catch up though!
People on HN read too much SciFi.
Re: Skip is now free and open source
#167Can you please stop assuming that everyone knows your randomly named niche software and use a more descriptive title for your posts? Much appreciated.
Please refresh yourself on https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Re: Skip is now free and open source
#168Earlier quoted context omitted.
The highest quality tools in the software development space tend to be FOSS, because unlike any other field, we are employed in the field that makes the tools our field uses, and distribution and manufacturing costs are zero. People build tools that they want to use, then share it with others because it's free to. If the rest of the economy worked like this we would be in full-blown utopia. Selling software to softwa…
> The highest quality tools in the software development space tend to be FOSS > People build tools that they want to use, then share it with others because it's free to This maybe sounds true on the surface, but isn't really? Prior to VSCode, Visual Studio was the most-used editor by professional developers for a very long time, with Sublime Text and Jetbrains' IDEs being close behind, and the paid options are still…
As a hobbyist programmer I make precisely zero dollars a year so paying for my tools only makes sense if they increase my nonmonetary enjoyment. As an employee I have very little power to convince my company to buy a certain tool and I tend to prefer the tools I‘m already familiar with from my hobby.
Re: Skip is now free and open source
#169Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've been programming since ~1999 and anecdataly don't remember programmers having a culture of paying for their dev tools. On linux everything's free, and on windows I've used a plethora of freeware IDEs/compilers/etc. from turbo pascal, dev c++ (that's the name of it), later on eclipse took the stage in it's buggy mess and right before vscode there was atom. The only people that I know that used visual studio eithe…
While many hobbyists developer market, like the hobbyist graphic design market, pirated their tools, the corporate market did paid for their tools. The issue here is that they the developers aren't convincing their companies to pay for libraries now, partly because a lot of the tools are now free.
The pain process and paperwork to obtain a license for anything in a corporate environment is usually the biggest factor imho.
Re: Skip is now free and open source
#170> The plain truth is that developers expect to get their tools free of charge. This is an accurate, but damning indictment of how some of the most highly paid workers on the planet won't pay for tools. Unlike nearly every other profession. Folks, if you can afford it, please pay for quality software, instead of relying on FAANG and VC money to keep the tools going!
The last paragraph is so accurate. Thanks. Just a small note: Developers, add your photo (mug shot) to your code, you receive more money. People do business with people.
In some book about behavioral economy there was a test with people in company kitchenette.
Above the coffee machine, there was a sign asking people who drink coffee at work to contribute to a jar for the next cpurchase. One sign was just text, while the other was also made with eyes. The one with eyes raised more money.