68
leanrob
6y

I have what seems to be an unpopular opinion about buying software as a software developer.

First off, I support open source all the way. There should always be free and open tools for people to use if the need or want to.

Second, if you underpaid, broke, unemployed, or a student then this doesn’t apply to you. You keep pushing forward!

With that said, let’s get to the meat of it all...

I pay for good software. Even when it is expensive. Even when there are “workable” free or open source solutions.

I do this for a number of reasons...

1. They are better, hands down.
(Tower > GitKraken, SourceTree, GitHub Desktop) (Kalidascope > every other diff tool) (JetBrains IDEs > Atom, Brackets ...)

2. I’m no longer a broke student. I make enough money to buy them.

3. Most important: I’m a fucking professional software developer, not a fucking joker.
- If I was a carpenter then I could always hammer nails with the back of my work boot. It’s free and paid for and will do the job. Instead I would buy a good hammer because I’d be a professional and not a fucking joker complaining about the price of the tools to do my job.

4. I use a Mac, sometimes Linux and NEVER Windows. Which means I have a platform that actually has useful apps built for developers who are willing to pay for it.

5. I don’t get caught up in developer circle jerks about how all development software should be open source and free.

————

So there you go.

Does this offend you?

Good!

Come at me bro

Comments
  • 11
    I use what ever I want and when I want.

    If these means having to pay to make the most of that tool set then so be it, if the open source alternative does 90% of what I need then I’ll use that and deal with the other 10% in either recreating it else where or dealing with the 10% manually.

    Every tool has its purpose, sometimes the free / open source version doesn’t cut the mustard or have enough support for what I’m trying to do (VMware vs virtualbox) for example, however virtual box does do a fine job on server environments it’s lack of support for desktop environments can be depressing at times.

    So good on you for paying for it instead of resorting to the open source, but as your example of tower-git is concerned, it’s just a desktop github app you’re forking cash out for instead of cli + github for code review.l, unless I missed something?

    But each to their own...
  • 4
    @C0D4 That a legitimately great mindset you have there sir.

    I highly respect using whatever you want whenever you want for whatever you want.

    No buts about it.

    In terms of Tower. That one I am always on the fence about since the Git CLI is such an important tool for developers to know.

    If you have used tower for a while on Mac (The windows beta wasn’t as good from what I heard) then you will find it to be really smooth and intuitive. Especially if your project uses Git-Flow.

    With that said, it’s current version does not do code reviews, so you do (and should always! Haha) do code reviews on GitHub or BitBucket.

    I am also beta testing the new Tower coming out and I think it will have built in code review so that will be cool to see.

    However, I would NEVER tell a new dev to use a Git GUI. The terminal is our friend, get acquainted with it properly.
  • 4
    @Null-Device I agree. Vim and terminal is a super hero mode and props for that.

    To be honest, this comes from regular circle jerks of devs I have worked with saying...

    “Why would you pay for X when Y is free! That’s stupid. Your wasting your money!”

    Those folks above are the jokers I speak of.

    Certainly not the Vim ninjas, respect.

    Yeah, I may be a bit butt hurt here. To quote workaholics
  • 0
    The sad thing is that F/LOSS tools have more potential than proprietary tools, but most proprietary tool are superior because they had a company that put money in them. But now you can make money with f/loss and they have more potential than proprietary, but because proprietary tools are most of the time better, they keep using it, slowing the f/loss alternative development. I hope new tools will become more and more f/loss in the future.
  • 3
    Oh yeah???! Well.....you......

    ........

    .... and me actually have the same mindset. I agree 100% with you man.
  • 1
    @leanrob I’ve been doing this long enough to not get into circle jerks, it’s always a matter of preference as to using paid / open / free software but I do stand by the use what you need to use to get the job done mantra.

    Tower looks good if I wanted to replace the github desktop app, that was a clunky shit storm which put me off guis and just use the terminal, although only just forking it to windows?
  • 1
    @C0D4 Agreed.

    I tried all he free clunky options and then gave up and went back to the terminal too.

    About a year later I tried Tower and it was such a pleasure.

    TBH: every few months I feel like my Git CLI skills are falling and I lock Tower and use terminal for my Git tasks to brush up for when pairing on another’s machine.
  • 0
    @AleCx04 This......... Guy............

    ... gets it!

    🍻
  • 4
    I agree with buying software, but not with buying subscriptions to use the software (like Jetbrains/Adobe CC does), or to use your analogy: I don't think carpenter pays a subscription to use his hammer.

    Good software costs good money, but subscriptions are just plain greed. I would rather buy new licenses than pay a yearly fee. Why? Because that way it's me who decides when it's a good time to upgrade.

    And also, free solutions are sometimes better. VS Code for Angular development is pretty awesome, and even though Webstorm can be awesome, you don't really need all of those features.
  • 1
    @arekxv Agreed. I would actually pay for a program itself, but Adobe stopped that for consumers, so...

    ...AMTEmu gotta patch it.
  • 8
    I wouldn't mind paying for open source software at all.

    It's me not about the money. Closed source software can hardly be checked for security issues and backdoors and in an age of mass surveillance and court orders being able to allow govts to force companies to build in backdoors, I'm not touching closed source software whenever I can.

    The best example imo is the CCleaner scandal, that shows how important transparent software is.
  • 0
    @Phippsaurus 👌
  • 1
    Comments - tl;dr

    We, broke students, get JetBrains IDEs for free 😁😋
    And yes, I agree, if I will have the money for it I will pay for it after I finish school... otherwise I will probably be using the community version of IntelliJ IDEA... which is fine but lacks a shitton of features that I use.
  • 1
    @arekxv @Bitwise @leanrob There is one argument in favor of buying software that you forgot:

    Suppose that you are a full time developer. Then you work about 40 hours a week, 40 weeks a year => 1600 hours a year. Suppose that you, as a good developer, earn 25 dollars per hour.

    Suppose a one time license costs you 100 dollars. That is 4 hours of work. If it saves you any time, that will over "some period of time" amount to 4 hours of work, and therefore you'd be stupid not to do it.

    Now, about the yearly licenses. If buying such a subscription saves you (more than) 4 hours per year (that is only 0.25 percent) of your time, it is profitable for you to have that subscription.

    Also, some paid tools save you " mental energy", because they make the development process more smooth. Therefore you will have energy to work on projects of your own after work, which can be regarded as "additional profit".

    If you have a boss, consider asking them for a license, because probably tax advantages..
  • 0
    If a paid software does the job better than the free alternatives and actually makes you more productive, why not to buy it? If it's a good product and it has a reasonable price, it's probably been made by someone who will probably make good use of that money anyways.
  • 1
    If i had money i sure would buy some software.
  • 1
    @Bitwise Ideavim 😉

    Also, ever had to write a constructor that just sets a couple of class properties? IntelliJ/Rider can do that for you. Ever had to rename a variable/property/class in 25 files without accidentally also renaming other variables with similar names? IntelliJ/Rider can do that.
    Of course, you can do these things manually, but the IDEs are so much faster and probably a lot less error-prone.
    Now, if you write HTML, for example, WebStorm will automatically help you with closing brackets and the likes.
    Also: on-the-fly syntax checking. (As well as "does this variable/class/method exist? Is this variable/method/class actually used?")

    Can vim do these things?

    Just some examples.
  • 0
    First of all if you think you can have premium software by paying or paying more you're totally wrong, sometimes is even the other way around!

    A tool is an investment: you try to not spend too much on it but the main focus should be on the achievable result because if the tool is not up for the job you'll also earn less.

    For the os choise it depends on your preferences and line of work; for me Windows can get the job done better even if i have to work on linux machines (remotely): i'm a programmer not a ethical writer so i don't mind if the best result is achieved on an "ugly/closed source/evil os", hardware wise there are pc even better than Apple on terms of quality and i don't economize on it because i need a reliable tool.

    Said so i think you're more against the "dirt-cheap/DYI" approach that tries to economize on everything when they're spending more time and money on a cheaper tool; said so throwing away money won't get you the other way around.
  • 0
    Open source software provides more support and lesser bugs & vunrelablity, due to transparency and contributors
  • 0
    Facebook and google developers are unprofessional, as many of them works with angular and react
  • 0
    @Phippsaurus okay, learned something new there ☺
  • 1
    Fuck yeah dude. That said, my sublime still says UNREGISTERED.

    Im still a student though, so I guess that's cool
  • 1
    I agree. But remember, free != open source.

    You can have free software which is not open source and you can have open source which is not free to use.
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