Re: Software Vendors (And US too) - A small rant

On 12/24/2012 1:52 AM, John Yeung wrote:

On Mon, Dec 17, 2012 at 11:57 AM, James Lampert
<jamesl@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Unfortunately, all too often, what is given away without charge
is perceived as being worthless.

I don't believe this is the case anymore in "mainstream" computing.
Ever since the Internet opened up to the masses and open source gained
a foothold, the expectation that decent or even excellent developer
tools (particularly programming languages, editors, and increasingly
IDEs and debuggers) are and should be available for free has been
growing; to the point that it is now the default (for other
platforms), as far as I can tell.

I have to agree with this. Developer tools should be free with income derived through support and services (so-called "gold" or "platinum" or "enterprise" versions), with the exception of high-end narrow-focus tooling that doesn't have the install base to support the services model.

IBM is continuing to move in that direction - IBM DB2 LUW has a free edition for developers. It's community supported and is only available for the current release, but it's entirely free.

The Rational products may never make that leap. They're too deeply entrenched in the high-end mainframe tools mentality in which it's commonplace to spend thousands of dollars per developer seat on tools. Since the IBM i fits squarely between those two end of the spectrum, their tooling strategy is schizophrenic at best.

Joe