Good tools are worth paying for

As an industry, we’ve long become accustomed (one might even say spoiled) on the no-cost availability of good tools. Those of us that came up with exposure to Linux, GNU, and the FOSS ecosystem in particular (not to mention the concurrent wave of peer-to-peer file sharing) are likely to have this mindset even more deeply entrenched. Have you ever paid money for a compiler? I have not (at least, that I can recall).

This has been an enormous boon for people and young companies wanting to get started: the capital investment required to learn how to build new things in software, actually build them, and build a new business or movement is incredibly low. And that’s been wonderful! It’s created careers, innovations, whole swaths of intellectual and economic growth.

It’s also created a mindset of never paying for our tools unless we absolutely have to. What started as a nice way to help teenagers learn to make websites has become the ideology of the captains of our industry–and their many deputies. And that’s to everyone’s detriment.

For the pedants out there, an acknowledgment: providing software at no cost was never the intention or the point of the free and open source software movement. For decades we’ve had to contend with the commingled meanings of “free” in English, clarifying with “free as in beer” and “free as in speech”. The latter was the thrust of FOSS from early on; the low cost was comparatively a side effect. But the impact of this side effect has been transformative.

There’s a strong argument that you should pay for your tools because it’s the Right Thing To Do. Somebody or many somebodies out there put in a lot of work to make that tool, and we should support them. This has merit! But it’s framing a purchase or a donation as charity–and this writeup isn’t about charity. If you get feelings when someone with a clipboard and a branded windbreaker approaches you in front of your local Starbucks, this ain’t gonna help.

You should pay for your tools because:

1. That’s how you get the best tools. If you’re stuck in the mindset of only ever using what you don’t have to pay for, you’re missing out on a lot of well-polished sharp blades. As I noted yesterday,, the difference in output quality between a free tool (OpenAI’s freebie DALL-E image generator) and a paid one (Midjourney’s¹ bleeding-edge diffusion model) is a wide chasm, and it’s enough to affect the reputability of your own work. There’s some incredible tools and services out there that are free, but limiting yourself to them exclusively is flying with blinders on. (Compare using your operating system’s built-in screenshot capabilities to CleanShot X.)

2. This is the only way our industry will change its mindset. Most of us that’ve found our ways into positions of influence or authority in the industry are old enough to have absorbed this never-invest mindset, and the knock-on effect is that a huge portion of the libraries and infrastructure underpinning the castles we’ve built are maintained by one or two burned-out folks that are one curse-ridden and disrespectful feature request away from throwing up their arms and walking away. Do something different yourself: pick either the most obscure or the most useful library that you, your team, or your org depends on, find a way to give them $100, and then tell your peers that you did. (I went for “obscure”, and give $10/month to Tridactyl.)

Let’s build a culture where paying for exceptional tools is the norm. The quality of your work and the health of our industry depends upon it.