Did Open Source Kill the Dev Tools Market?
by Sam Dean - Jun. 10, 2008Comments (0)- Related Blog Posts
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"The tools market is dead. Open source killed it. The only commercial tools that can survive today are the ones that leapfrog open source tools." That's the position that John De Goes, president of N-BRAIN, takes in an interesting new interview. While it's true that open source development tools and environments have made big inroads in recent years, I only partially agree with De Goes.
In his recent interview, De Goes discusses his decision to make UNA Personal Edition--a collaborative development environment--free:
"So I think we've slowly come to the realization that in order to gain widespread acceptance, UNA Personal Edition has to be free—not free just for version 1.0, but free for all versions, for all time. We will never charge a penny for UNA Personal Edition. Now it can compete with all the other free stuff out there."
Now, this is where I can go along with De Goes. Long ago, development tools were huge sources of income for many software companies. Do you remember way back when when Borland's market capitalization was not all that far behind Microsoft's? That valuation, which went up in smoke, was built largely on lucrative development tools.
Nowadays, open source development tools and environments are so strong and prevalent, that the instant an author of a set of development tools considers charging for it, it's time to think again. That doesn't mean that proprietary tools won't continue, though. Commercial software vendors--with Microsoft as a prime example--will retain interests in tying development tools, and the features they offer, to the applications that they charge for. Do you agree?
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