Difference between investing money and wasting money

[rd409]

Hi all,
When I was a permie, I use to put down request for all kind of softwares and tools. We even had an enterprise edition of Visual Studio, and the developers made the business purchase a MSDN subscription.
Now the tables have turned, and I am into contracting world where I have to spend money for each tool I need or use. VS subscriptions go out of the window straight away. Who would want to pay £750 when you can get things done for free!!!
I started using Eclipse, as a replacement for VS for most of the projects, and VS Express edition for some where Eclipse was not sufficient.
Is it still called investing money if Open source equivalent of almost all tools are available for free?

[doodab]

The question comes down to how much additional time you can save / money you can make with the paid-for tools as opposed to the free ones, and the oppurtunity cost of spending that money on something else like a faster computer.

[Lockhouse]

I use MS but never pay full price - I use their Direct Access programme or whatever it's called now.

[Spacecadet]

VS subscriptions go out of the window straight away. Who would want to pay £750 when you can get things done for free!!!

If you have your own limited company and its less than 3 years old then you can get the MSDN subscription for a nominal fee

[thunderlizard]

Who would want to pay £750 when you can get things done for free!!!

Somebody who brings in £750 in a day and a bit, and knows that ultimately it takes longer than that scrabbling around on the internet and stepping through overcomplicated source code to get the open source version working.

[rd409]

Somebody who brings in £750 in a day and a bit, and knows that ultimately it takes longer than that scrabbling around on the internet and stepping through overcomplicated source code to get the open source version working.

I do not support Open source just because of the financial aspect. But I also hate the performance degradation with those expensive suites. Eclipse with 6 projects open with a total memory usage just under 150MB. Try that with Visual Studio.

And again, if you really dont want to scrabble around internet to customise your tool, there are so many organisations who would do it for a tenth as compared to VS subscription.

And the difference is with Fixes and Upgrades in the tool. I have better chance of getting issues sorted with OS than VS.

And this comes from someone who actually helps organisations adopt OS technologies and tools.

[meridian]

Where's the "I make sure I install the client's copy on my own machine as well" option?

[d000hg]

I do not support Open source just because of the financial aspect. But I also hate the performance degradation with those expensive suites. Eclipse with 6 projects open with a total memory usage just under 150MB. Try that with Visual Studio.

Eclipse might do that if you don't use a whole bunch of plugins. But most of Eclipse's power comes from plugins, and these can be slow or buggy or memory-hungry. Not to mention plugins aren't all free.

It's also a bit stupid to say "OS code is fast, proprietary is slow". You're comparing one product from each world so the fact Eclipse is OS is rather irrelevant, it's not a general argument.

Also, I've always found Eclipse rather slow, or perhaps sedate is a better word. It takes ages to load up for me. It's a wonderful tool, but those who have used the main non-free Java tool IntelliJ mostly seem to say it's WAY better.

[VectraMan]

But I also hate the performance degradation with those expensive suites. Eclipse with 6 projects open with a total memory usage just under 150MB. Try that with Visual Studio.

46 projects currently open in VS2010 Pro; 250MB used.

But who cares? I have 4GB. What do you think memory is for?

I thought Eclipse was a poor man's IDE for Java? The Java'ists I've worked with all say Eclipse isn't very good, but I don't know from first hand experience. As with most Open Source people convince themselves it's as good because they want to believe it's just as good, not because it is.

I do think there's a certain hypocracy in being paid to write software, whilst expecting someone else's work to be available to you for free. But I have used various Open Source libraries, and for a while recently I put some effort into converting a large MFC project to use wxWidgets and the (free) VS2010 Express thinking this could be a way to cut costs. But then I gave myself a reality slap and realised that was way too much work, and I had to keep it MFC, and so had to buy VS2010 Pro.

[thunderlizard]

Eclipse Sits On Man's Couch, Breaks It

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