[Source Slashdot] jexrand recommends an interview with John De Goes in which he argues: "The tools market is dead. Open source killed it."
The software developer turned president of N-BRAIN explains the effect that open source has had on the developer tools market, and how
this forced the company to release the personal edition of UNA free of charge. According to De Goes, selling a source-code editor, even
a very good one, is all but impossible in the post-open source era, especially given that, "Some developers would rather quit their job
than be forced to use a new editor or IDE." N-BRAIN's decision is but one in a string of similar announcements from tools companies
announcing the free release of their previously commercial development tools.
Open-source is here to stay, and it is going to change the business model for a great many products. I regularly uses tools from both
sides (NUnit, NCover, Reflector) and (Resharper). Both open source and commercial product have to be innovative -- but they tend to
innovate in differenet ways and for different reasons.