> at 199 USD yearly phpstorm is prohibitively expensive for small teams and independent devs
First, that $200 rate is for teams; independent devs can pay a significantly lower rate (the catch is, you have to pay it personally, not expense it or be reimbursed by an employer).
And even for teams, $200 a year is nothing. If you can afford to hire devs in a first world country (US/EU/Aus/etc), you can afford tools for them. NO employer you should possibly consider working for is going to quibble over the license fee; not when they're already paying 1000 times that in fully loaded costs in salary/rent/overheads/benefits/etc.
If you can't find $200 for a tool to help you do your job, you're not really a professional. (Again, in a 1st world country.)
- How much time (i.e. labor hours) will it take to find and vet an alternative solution Y to solution X (provided that you already know that X will solve your problem/save you time)?
- How do you value your time?
- What's your tolerance for community-only support vs. commercial support?
The list goes on, but gratis isn't always better just because you don't need to pull out your wallet.
You usually need to vet all editors. You download a free trial or you download an open source version. After a month the paided on stops working until you pay causing friction. The open source editor keeps working and even provides updates.
In general choosing open source saves you time with yearly licease management, licease audits and removes the risk of surprise price increases and product shutdown.
Commercial support can be invaluable and can provide more value over community support. Commercial support for a code editor is wasteful in terms of cost/value and wasteful timewise (who is calling spending time about a macro feature not working).
They are paid for by future development and / or increased adoption.
Take the most popular open source editor (vscode). Do you think microsoft is getting value from this open source product? Why didn't they charge a yearly licease fee instead of open sourcing it? They were probably more interested in increased adoption...
My point was about random people trying to make a living out of open source, while others feel entitled not to support them, while enjoying earning money.
Not about corporations doing open source as advertising stunt.
Which is precisely why anything I produce, is either commercial or under GPL.
yes, I realised my mistake of not seeing the For individuals tab... 89 USD is a little more palatable.
The thing I do not agree is that you have to pay for tools in order to be a professional. That is quite elitist. People make careers out of free platforms like Linux so for an IDE is not asking much to have a good tool for free. The community benefits from labor put into developing a free tool.
> The thing I do not agree is that you have to pay for tools in order to be a professional.
Absolutely not! You don't have to pay, and there's tons of free tools which are top rate.
What I said is that if you're a professional, you're able to pay for the tools that are worth it. If Phpstorm is worth it (and I think it is, but many devs I respect feel otherwise), $200 is deeply affordable by Western standards.
As a professional, you should have a budget for things like software licenses, books, donations to open source projects you really like, etc., whether that comes out of your funds as a consultant, or team's budget, etc. If your employer is too stingy to cover things like Phpstorm licenses...they're not treating you like a professional.
(Again, in first world/Western countries. Budgets and pay scales are different in some places!)
> I am sorry if I misinterpreted you, but that was precisely what you said.
If you have the money to spend on tools, but think Linux or VS Code is best, that's fine.
If OS X would be better for you, but you use Linux because you can't afford the tools you need, that's a problem.
Being able to find the money for something doesn't mean you have to spend the money. At the price point of a few hundred dollars a year or less, my concern is what's best, not what's cheapest. The company I work for will happily buy a Phpstorm license for any dev who wants one, but some are happy with VS Code, and one holdout is still using NetBeans. Nothing wrong with that!
I can't even convince IT to put an SSD or increase my RAM from 8GB to 16 on this workstation. There's a process that I tried to go through and later my boss said they spent two hours on the phone with IT but it went nowhere so I asked my boss to not waste any more time on this nonsense.
I can't imagine having to justify a subscription to IntelliJ at this workplace. At least I imagine you can bring your own license to Jetbrains on a work computer here, at least that is my understanding and I won't ask anyone lest they say I am wrong!
Other professionals go to bazaar and flea markets to get their tools at a discount, but they still have to pay for them.
Just in IT it is now fashionable to feel entitled to earn money without buying tools, then comes dual licenses, closing doors or acquisitions because devs don't pay supermarket with pull requests.
First, that $200 rate is for teams; independent devs can pay a significantly lower rate (the catch is, you have to pay it personally, not expense it or be reimbursed by an employer).
And even for teams, $200 a year is nothing. If you can afford to hire devs in a first world country (US/EU/Aus/etc), you can afford tools for them. NO employer you should possibly consider working for is going to quibble over the license fee; not when they're already paying 1000 times that in fully loaded costs in salary/rent/overheads/benefits/etc.
If you can't find $200 for a tool to help you do your job, you're not really a professional. (Again, in a 1st world country.)