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.
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.