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Comment by latchkey | Hacker News Reader

Anyone remember having to pay for cc on Solaris? [0] It was horrible and a terrible way to treat developers who are writing software for your OS!

We have been conditioned for a very long time to not need to pay for low level developer tools and to pay for support instead. I'm surprised they even tried to license it like that.

[0] https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/12731/usr-ucb-cc-la...

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There’s a distinction between the maker of the OS/hardware and an independent vendor trying to monetize the tools.

The OS/hardware maker’s primary interest is in selling more OS or hardware, so it makes sense for them to give away the tools (or their work enhancing the already-free tools) that enable more and better applications.

An independent tool vendor is in a different position, and there have always been vendors with better tools, maybe for a specialized market, or maybe just going above and beyond what comes for free, which is what Mold tries to do.

In other words, it’s clear to everyone now that the essential tools should be free, but surely not that all tools should be free!

> In other words, it’s clear to everyone now that the essential tools should be free, but surely not that all tools should be free!

Obviously not, since their business model changed.

They were charging $100/yr [1]. Literal peanuts. Actually, that is unfair to the peanuts, it is literal pocket lint.

The average cost of a developer is more than $100/hr. mold needs to make you 0.05% (not 5%, 0.05%) more productive to directly pay for itself. If mold saves you 13 seconds a day in linking time it directly pays for itself. This ignores the knock on effects of reduced build time shortening the feedback cycle which completely dwarf the direct benefits.

It is ridiculous that such dirt cheap pricing for tools is viewed as a problem. As we saw in a post yesterday [2], this is why they say there is no money is tools.

[1] https://bluewhale.systems/

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36869747

Only $100/yr? Likely that is the problem then. Who's going to bother filing a P.O. with their mega company for only that amount?

It also wasn't paywalled, meaning tons of people probably just added it as a dependency in the CI and just ignored the license restrictions because it wasn't directly part of the shipped binary. There's no good way to enforce that.

> and just ignored the license restrictions because it wasn't directly part of the shipped binary. There's no good way to enforce that.

There's not anything to enforce. The AGPL allows you to run the application for any purpose. (If you modify the source, you have to make the modified source available to all users, including over the network users.)

Oh, you're right on that one. Kind of entertaining that the AGPL is all about linking, and this is the linker.

The GPL is all about linking. The AGPL is about extending what it means to distribute the software to SAAS-like uses.

At work in the 90s I was allowed to buy a brand new sparc workstation with a shrinkwrap compiler (and shrinkwrap sybase). One of the first things I did was compile gcc so I could install the whole gnu world.

Exactly! I begged someone random for a gcc tarball.

Now I am imagining you panhandling on the sidewalk, stopping random strangers and shaking slightly: “hey man, can you spare a gcc tarball?”

They did the same at my first job out of college (Sun based company). It was my first introduction to free software. That was circa 1990... it's amazing that gcc is still going strong.

This is unfortunately still the norm in the FPGA world, which I think is a poor decision in the long term for Intel/Xilinx. I wanted to seriously get into FPGA dev a decade or so ago, I learned to write Verilog and everything but the tooling made me give up, it was too painful to deal with all the quirks and limitations of the free tools.

It is possible to download and use the Xilinx tools for free. My company sells bare metal access to FPGA's and our customers do it all the time.

I agree with the tooling being a nightmare though. It is a 80gb+ install that fails half the time.

You forgot that it crashes in random times and that the text editor refuses to open files because sigasi can't be initialized

I didn't forget, I just didn't get past the install. ;-)

I admit I'm mostly familiar with the Intel (formerly Altera) side. There are no restrictions at all on the Xilinx side? That's pretty neat.

You sign up on their website and click ok on the long eula nobody reads and then click download. So yea, there are probably restrictions, but they don't have a paywall in front of them. This isn't legal advice at all.

You had to buy C compiler on many operating systems. At least once upon a time, it came with another giant set of books.

Codewarrior for the win! I used to hate all the times I would mess up a pointer and my whole machine would freeze up.

I am so glad GCC came and took over, even if I didn't have to live through this era.

The standard choice being free and good (best, in many cases) really can't be overstated.

GCC was largely ignored until the day Sun introduced the concept of UNIX user and developer editions.

Only then it started to gain momentum from people not willing to pay for Solaris Developer SDK.

In any case, I bet people using free beer tools enjoy being paid for their work, so just maybe they should also think in giving some money to the authors of those tools.

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