undefined | Better HN

0 pointsmichaelt1y ago0 comments

There's a long history of the likes of Redis, MongoDB, Grafana, Terraform etc first releasing their product as free and open source to get adoption, hoping to make money by some indirect means, then relicensing to closed source later on because nobody pays for something they can get for free.

And pretty much all major programming languages and libraries are given away for free too. Someone tries to introduce BitKeeper, a commercial version control system, for the Linux kernel? They won't stand for it, some's gotta clone it and give the clone away for free.

Hell, I've heard loads of people here on HN complaining when a SaaS company introduces features exclusively useful to large corporations - like single-sign-on integration - then wants to get paid for them.

There's a handful of exceptions. For example game developers will pay $$$ for "Unity" and store their assets in "Perforce" and suchlike. And I believe it's possible to pay for Visual Studio.

0 comments

2 comments · 2 top-level

pjc501y ago

This is where remembering the free-costless and free-libre distinction is important. Linux is free-libre, so it's natural that it insists on its dependencies being free-libre.

Free-libre is necessarily also free-costless, but not the other way round.

> Visual Studio

It's interesting that everywhere I've worked as a Microsoft shop happily pays for MSDN, which gives you not just VS but a huge amount of other stuff.

Perforce handles large binary assets much better than git. There are also paid for closed version control systems that are really bad but get used anyway, such as in IC design.

shaky-carrousel1y ago

People usually dislike bait and switch schemes.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse