Every discussion I’ve seen about this so far has been so negative.
I hope Lemmy with its very left wing audience might have a more compassionate approach around the desire for open source developers to be compensated for their work.
Or at the very least that companies profiting from open source work start to pay back to those contributors
The issue here is that it’s just a library that makes testing assertions a little nicer. It’s not some super important library that developers get huge productivity gains with.
The author has sold the rights to the project to a commercial entity - Xceed who’s now selling it for $130 per dev - $130 for a library that just makes your unit tests assertions a little nicer! It’s an insane price, I have no idea how they’ve come up with that. That’s IDE licence territory.
A part of me is starting to think that this is actually a stunt to raise brand awareness of Xceed more than anything else.
As developers we should value our time and I don’t think it’s unreasonable to charge $130 for an hour of a .NET developers time, therefore I personally don’t have an issue with paying $130 per year for a tool that has proven itself useful.
I really think we need to see a revolution in how open source projects are funded. Personally, I’d love to transition to a career developing open source tools but I can’t justify it because whether you charge $1 or $130 people will always complain.
That’s IDE licence territory.
I know what you mean but I also think we’re very fortunate for the value for money we get from IDEs.
I get what you’re saying, but it’s $130 per dev for just effectively doing this:
Assert.Equal(2025, year)
into
year.Should().Be(2025)
It’s just not worth it at all. Don’t forget that this is per dev, so a 100 dev team is looking at a $13,000 bill just to use this package. Now imagine if every other package required a sum equal or much bigger than this?
I don’t disagree for popular open source projects charging for commercial use, but the price has to be sensible. Even just $0.20/dev would probably yield a decent income.
Every discussion I’ve seen about this so far has been so negative.
I hope Lemmy with its very left wing audience might have a more compassionate approach around the desire for open source developers to be compensated for their work.
Or at the very least that companies profiting from open source work start to pay back to those contributors
The issue here is that it’s just a library that makes testing assertions a little nicer. It’s not some super important library that developers get huge productivity gains with.
The author has sold the rights to the project to a commercial entity - Xceed who’s now selling it for $130 per dev - $130 for a library that just makes your unit tests assertions a little nicer! It’s an insane price, I have no idea how they’ve come up with that. That’s IDE licence territory.
A part of me is starting to think that this is actually a stunt to raise brand awareness of Xceed more than anything else.
I kind of disagree that $130 is a lot of money.
As developers we should value our time and I don’t think it’s unreasonable to charge $130 for an hour of a .NET developers time, therefore I personally don’t have an issue with paying $130 per year for a tool that has proven itself useful.
While I’ve never used it myself I am aware of it and looking at if this stat (https://github.com/fluentassertions/fluentassertions/network/dependents) is to believed then there are well over 100,000 projects on GitHub alone all of whom have benefit from the author’s free labour.
I really think we need to see a revolution in how open source projects are funded. Personally, I’d love to transition to a career developing open source tools but I can’t justify it because whether you charge $1 or $130 people will always complain.
I know what you mean but I also think we’re very fortunate for the value for money we get from IDEs.
I get what you’re saying, but it’s $130 per dev for just effectively doing this:
Assert.Equal(2025, year)into
year.Should().Be(2025)It’s just not worth it at all. Don’t forget that this is per dev, so a 100 dev team is looking at a $13,000 bill just to use this package. Now imagine if every other package required a sum equal or much bigger than this?
I don’t disagree for popular open source projects charging for commercial use, but the price has to be sensible. Even just $0.20/dev would probably yield a decent income.