Probably old news for a lot of people here, but a cathartic piece for me to write. It's hard not to come across as partisan, but it's a great time to be in software.
Why is it cathartic? Are you angry? Do you feel victimized or held hostage? Maybe you should have written more about your feelings.
Anyway, you make points that I can sympathize with but I don't understand some of it. Why do people have such a visceral dislike of licensing costs? Presumably most HN people want to eventually build a start up that charges people money for a software service. People here are often quite indignant when someone complains a service costs too much. Yet MS is somehow bad for making money. Personally I find most of their pricing to be reasonable (in some cases that's no doubt thanks to pressure from free alternatives).
Also why do people always write these goodbyes and feel they have to cast off everything from MS forever? These proclamations are just strange. Let it be known to everyone that I'm never having apple flavored jolly ranchers again! Seriously, think of MS as just another shop in the bazaar.
The license cost point is a good one. I actually think it is kind of sad that software as a profession is all becoming enterprise software. No offense, but look at almost all of the YC projects... they're all things that I frankly would have had virtually no interest in coding as a kid. It all looks CRUD apps with the word "social" in the pitch.
But I think the profession has become one where software is marginalized, and you make money off of everything else. It's like music. No one wants to pay you for the music -- you have to make money selling t-shirts.
And then we have threads where people are surprised to see people say, "I just need a programmer".
The license cost point is a good one. I actually think it is kind of sad that software as a profession is all becoming enterprise software. No offense, but look at almost all of the YC projects... they're all things that I frankly would have had virtually no interest in coding as a kid. It all looks CRUD apps with the word "social" in the pitch.
Yeah, this was actually a point of contention when OSS started getting big, I think. But it was inevitable--things that are fun to write, people will write for fun.
I think there's some fun stuff left. Low level code tied to specific hardware and code that very few people need and can be held as a competitive advantage, for instance.
Fair points, cathartic is probably the wrong word - how about 'draw a line under'.
I don't think Microsoft is bad to want to make money, more that the choices around now make it a different dynamic around web technologies.
I'm not sure why others write these posts, for me it was more a long winded way to say 'After a long time I'm not mainly using the Microsoft dev stack, here's what this blog will be about'.
I won't suddenly forget 6 years of .net, but for me it's quite a shift.
> Why do people have such a visceral dislike of licensing costs?
They don't; what they dislike is the hassle of managing license keys, not being able to fix broken software themselves. The problem is not to be free as beer, but free as speech. And this is why RMS is true :)
If I'm using off-the-shelf software rather than writing my own, it's because either it's huge and complex or it's not important enough to make time from other projects.
In either case, I'm trading off flexibility for the speed at which I can have _something_ and I care far more about having something that works tolerably well than having something I can change to make it work better. If it breaks, I'll find something else; the software ecosystem is big enough now.
Which is why I'll take "reasonably reliably working" over "I've got the rights to fix it".
With topics like these I think people project a lot of their own decision processes. I enjoyed writing it, and if people get some sort of reaction or thoughts out of it then I'm happy.
Why do people have such a visceral dislike of licensing costs?
Some people are like that, sure, but that's a loud minority of idiots.
For me it's not a dislike for licensing costs, but a preference for free of charge; like all people I like a good deal when I see one.
Not to mention that most software requiring licensing costs also has additional handicaps, like not being able to look at the source code or fix it; which is really necessary sometimes, especially when your company is in the software business.
I should add that when I worked for others then license costs seemed more ok and a little more abstract. Now I pay wages then I'm less keen on those SQL server per processor costs.
I hope what I wrote in the blog didn't come across as visceral anti anything, especially making or spending money.
