The crude reality is that development tools cost real money to be developed and we no longer are in a environment where VCs are showering companies with bags of money without some really down-to-earth, concrete plan for profitability.
Companies like Microsoft and Google can have themselves the luxury of keeping projects like VSCode and Golang open source. The economics make sense for them. Not all companies can do that, especially small startups.
I remember a time when buying a C compiler cost money, real money. I don’t think we are ever going back to that, but I also think that paid tools with enterprise pricing are back.
I don’t care about the morality of that and I am arguing pro neither against it. It is a just a fact, a seismic shift that we can’t really stop.
