“Our 500k developers would not pay to use it. Our diagnosis is that individual developers do not pay for tools.”
I don’t like depending on something I could lose in a month or tethers me to the internet. I consider that more a service than a tool. I’d prefer to just buy something once that just works, but that business model might be dead too since people will pirate things that aren't tethered to some serverside component.
I guess what I’m saying is that I want to buy tools, but people are only renting. Personally I’m largely holding out hope this becomes someone’s open source passion project and I can truly own my tools.
Software developers are also more likely than most to be "free software people". I for one am excited to see Kite go open source; if it's truly open, including the underlying recommendation models and algorithms, I will be happy to use it and set up a monthly donation for whoever wants to keep working on it.
Exactly. Non-free software is always paying for a service. If you don't get the source (and the ability to use it) you don't get the software. The source code is the software... the binary is an merely way to access a small part of it.
> If it's truly open, including the underlying recommendation models and algorithms, I will be happy to use it and set up a monthly donation for whoever wants to keep working on it.
Knowing examples such as Hudson CI & co, that probably makes it "no one", at a statistical scale.
I think it’s a combination of a few behaviors: Developers have this “if I can do it myself albeit in 10 times more time I won’t pay for the service even if it doesn’t make any financial sense whatsoever” and “This is cool but requires investment of my time while not providing way out of they start to suck or disappear” and “this is clever but what I need is help with the boring bits” mentality.
The stuff most developers are comfortable paying for is things like hosting, tools that do something the developers find very boring or have no domain overlap and don’t have viable free alternative.
“Why would I pay 9.99 if I can set up a free alternative in a few days and host it myself for 4.99? If I can’t host it myself I don’t trust you anyway”
I like what the other has said in under another comment — selling software to software engineers is like selling magic to magician. You are a magician, a very unfriendly use case to prioritize. It is reasonable for you to want what you want, but it would be suicide for the business to prioritize acquiring you as a customer.
I don’t like depending on something I could lose in a month or tethers me to the internet. I consider that more a service than a tool. I’d prefer to just buy something once that just works, but that business model might be dead too since people will pirate things that aren't tethered to some serverside component.
I guess what I’m saying is that I want to buy tools, but people are only renting. Personally I’m largely holding out hope this becomes someone’s open source passion project and I can truly own my tools.