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Skip is now free and open source

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Re: Skip is now free and open source

#91

Post by OkayPhysicist »

nsm wrote: post #70

> 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 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 software developers is always going to have a pretty low ceiling, because you're always going to be competing with "I could build this myself" while dealing with a bunch of users who will have the nagging thought of "Why the heck does this bug exist/this feature not exist? I could fix this in an afternoon." Ironically, open source relieves this pressure for multiple orders of magnitude more people than actually contribute, because they're only grappling with their own laziness, rather than resenting you, the developer.

Re: Skip is now free and open source

#92

Post by cortesoft »

nsm wrote: post #82
yencabulator wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fewer proprietary abandonwares are in my dependencies the more I can actually do things. It's less about the price and more about the freedom. From the link: > Beyond pricing, there’s a deeper concern about durability. Developers are understandably wary of building their entire app strategy on a small company’s paid, closed-source tool.

Would you pay for source-available products? GPL and paid license? Along with a guarantee that you get to keep access to older versions (Jetbrains and Sublime Text models)?

Personally, probably not, although I would be more likely to than if I couldn't access the source.

I just don't have a good history with software created and sold by a company. Their incentives rarely seem aligned with mine, and I have had too many rug-pulls to fall for it again.

Companies that start out with sensible and open policies too often struggle to make money, and then end up trying to pull back on their openness and suddenly important bits aren't able to be modified or controlled by the user anymore.

Re: Skip is now free and open source

#93

Post by jchw »

nsm wrote: post #70

> 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!

To be completely fair, this becomes significantly less mystifying when you trace back the origins of the free software movement...

edit: To be a bit less opaque, a relevant quote:

> In the late 1970s, Richard Stallman had an issue with a new printer installed in the MIT AI Lab, where he worked at the time, which ran proprietary firmware. Richard Stallman was frustrated that he could not receive a copy of the printer software and edit the code to solve his problem. This early experience made him realize limits of non-free software was a social issue.

Importantly: it was never about cost. It was about the rights of users of software. It's just that the particular rights that GNU was concerned with also makes it challenging to have a moat on monetizing the resulting software.

Re: Skip is now free and open source

#94

Post by yencabulator »

nsm wrote: post #82
yencabulator wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fewer proprietary abandonwares are in my dependencies the more I can actually do things. It's less about the price and more about the freedom. From the link: > Beyond pricing, there’s a deeper concern about durability. Developers are understandably wary of building their entire app strategy on a small company’s paid, closed-source tool.

Would you pay for source-available products? GPL and paid license? Along with a guarantee that you get to keep access to older versions (Jetbrains and Sublime Text models)?

If it's GPL, it's not really source-available anymore. The dual licensing thing is more to give big companies a cheaper way out than bothering their lawyers.

Me personally, I treat source-available roughly the same as proprietary. I fix bugs in other people's code as suits my needs, and source-available is just hostile to the whole idea of anyone else touching the source.

Re: Skip is now free and open source

#95

Post by ashishb »

There have been several iterations to have a unified way to build Android and iOS apps.

  - using HTML
  - using JavaScript
  - using JS+React
  - using Dart
  - using Kotlin
  - using Swift
This fundamentally does not work for anyone with more than 10M+ installs just like you can't write Mandarin and English in one script.

This only works for devs who over time churn out as their app fails or becomes too big [1]

1 - https://ashishb.net/tech/react-native/

Re: Skip is now free and open source

#96

Post by Imustaskforhelp »

wahnfrieden wrote: post #80
Imustaskforhelp wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

hey, came from the other comment you messaged me but this feels like such an apple issue which is so fixable that I am not understanding why Apple won't do it. I understand what you are feeling but I feel like what you are saying is genuine and although sad right now, it provides a course of action for Apple to work upon to meaningfully improve it so that we can get atleast either custom license source available (as…

Apple won't improve this out of charity for small businesses. Apple has no real loyalty to developers outside of their largest partners. This requires regulation, and/or mass organizing across developers.

> Apple won't improve this out of charity for small businesses. Apple has no real loyalty to developers outside of their largest partners. This requires regulation, and/or mass organizing across developers.

Isn't there an EU law where if Enough signatures happen they are forced to discuss it in the EU parliament or similar? I remember this from the stop killing games movement iirc.

Mass organizations can take place too but why not a mix of both utilizing both regulations and mass organizations?

Re: Skip is now free and open source

#97

Post by ppeetteerr »

nsm wrote: post #70

> 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!

Engineers are happy to pay for tools (hello, Claude Code). Libraries are quite different and it's a little uncomfortable to build a business on a closed-source, proprietary library.

Re: Skip is now free and open source

#98

Post by scotty79 »

nsm wrote: post #70

> 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!

> damning indictment of how some of the most highly paid workers on the planet won't pay for tools

I'm gonna pay for work. I'm not gonna pay for copy of some bytes. Especially not because lawyers say so.

Figure out a business model that doesn't require you to put a policeman behind my back to make it work. It's not that hard. Steam has one. GOG has one.

Re: Skip is now free and open source

#99

Post by awesome_dude »

jchw wrote: post #93
nsm wrote: post #70

> 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!

To be completely fair, this becomes significantly less mystifying when you trace back the origins of the free software movement... edit: To be a bit less opaque, a relevant quote: > In the late 1970s, Richard Stallman had an issue with a new printer installed in the MIT AI Lab, where he worked at the time, which ran proprietary firmware. Richard Stallman was frustrated that he could not receive a copy of the printer…

> Importantly: it was never about cost. It was about the rights of users of software.

The cost (free) got me looking, but the rights, now that's what kept me.

Costs - being a poor student meant I was not ever in a position to pay for products (even those massively subsidised by companies like Microsoft) - there was no way I could buy an IDE, or a compiler, or anything that I needed to /learn/.

Rights - once I had the products, I was able to see how they worked, and, more importantly, make changes that worked for me, and, if desired, share those changes so other people could take advantage of them. None of that was possible under the other licences.

Re: Skip is now free and open source

#100

Post by fourthark »

bossyTeacher wrote: post #86
fn-mote wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What's the point? Marketing for my skills as a developer? There's no more need for software consultants now with Copilot/etc. I have to change careers. I encourage you to find a way out of this belief, or at least least fend it off as long as possible. You can see from recent HN postings that most people are not experiencing career-ending levels of performance from LLMs.

>most people are not experiencing career-ending levels of performance from LLMs. You don't have to. Experiencing increased competition for jobs or lower pay for the same job (because less devs are needed for the same level of output) is just as bad. Experiencing increased competition for jobs or lower pay for the same job (because the AI industry imploded and the devs from that industry are now in the market) is just…

Third possibility negates the first two.

Also, did VB6 put anyone out of work?

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