• Rogue@feddit.uk
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    9 hours ago

    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.

    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.

    • blackn1ght@feddit.ukOP
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      4 hours ago

      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.

      • Rogue@feddit.uk
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        3 hours ago

        I do agree that per dev is such a weird way to do licensing. I have no idea how you would possibly police it. But I guess per dev is the simplest mechanism to ensure large corporations pay more than one man bands.

        Even just $0.20/dev would probably yield a decent income.

        My understanding has always been that just getting a billing department to pay a bill is the main barrier so whether it’s 20 cents or 120 dollars they’ll be just as resistant. Therefore you may as well charge them the latter.

        I assume a company with a 100 strong dev team would simply negotiate a more reasonable fee so there’s no harm in asking $13k on the off chance a corporation is so flush they just pay it.