Is it wrong of me to be a little miffed that I paid $50, admittedly a long time ago, for Textmate?
So it's a bit wrong of you to think you were bamboozled.
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3 years of use from a product, plus we now have the almost-guaranteed support and speedier development because of it's Open Source nature. I think it was worth the money.
If you paid for it last week, I can understand frustration.
I am more pessimistic. I think the project died and open sourcing will just reanimate it to undead Zombie status.
If you program for your day job you're using your editor something like 2,000 hours a year. I paid for TextMate something like 5 years ago... given that I used it for approaching 10,000 hours since then...
A text editor and a computer have such an amazing return on investment it makes anything else pale in comparison. Even if you're paid $50,000 per year, your $50 investment into TextMate made you $250,000... or paid for itself 500 time over. (Edit: Sorry, I mean 5,000 times over.)
: Pedantry concludes.
I've gotten far more than $50 out of having access to Textmate 2 during that time.
I don't feel miffed at all.
Here the developer talks about regretting the free upgrade: http://old.nabble.com/TM2-to28405435.html#a28707277
A year later, I bought it again... that time my license number was #37475. (Though I think at that point it had been in various promotions and bundles, so who knows how much $ it translates to.)
How many hours did you use it?
Well worth the $50
I use my keyboard for work constantly, but it is not worth more than maybe $10 to me.
I use my keyboard for work constantly, but it is not worth more than maybe $10 to me.
I'd say his measurement of utility makes a lot more sense than yours.
I've bought 3 Microsoft Natural 4000s (about a $60 keyboard) over the past 3 years simply because I was away from my office for an extended period of time and my wrists started hurting.
I have an old Model M at home that I value at a hell of a lot more than $10; I am not here to argue the merits of expensive keyboards. My point though is that the cheap keyboards I have around that have gotten a lot of use are not worth more because I have gotten a lot of use from them. No matter how much work I have gotten paid for while working on a $10 keyboard, it is still a $10 keyboard.
The value is in replaceability. It comes down to the question, "if I take this away from you, what will you do then?".
Textmate was valuable because it was a piece of software that its users could not easily replace to their satisfaction.
If I take your $10 keyboard away, your next move would be to pick up some other $10 keyboard. Hence why the value is $10.
Some pieces of software are valuable even if you barely ever use them. It may be something you use once a year to complete a project, but if it's not easily swapped out for some other replacement, and completing that project is something of high value to you, then that piece of software is valuable - much more so than the small amount of time you spend using it would indicate.
My only issue is with what I saw as a suggestion that if you are dissatisfied with a purchase then you can offset that by using that purchase a lot.
Presumably owenjones thinks he paid too much for textmate/textmate2, and presumably was not planning on using textmate/textmate2 for less than two years when he thought it was a good deal. Pointing out that he should be satisfied because he used his purchase for two years so far seems very silly to me.
If you use something for longer than its expected lifespan, then I can see it. If you buy a car expecting it to last 100k miles but it lasts 200k miles instead, then yes you should feel satisfied with your purchase even if you feel you were being ripped off at the time by the dealer. -- Now, if you were planning on 100k miles, and got 100k miles, then simply getting the usage you were planning on getting at purchase time really shouldn't make you feel better about being overcharged.
The intrinsic values that the keyboard itself has should set its worth, not the value you extracted from it in the past. It is a keyboard, not an heirloom.
This is only going to be <$10 in general if you have a pile of spares right to hand, with unit cost <($10 - epsilon). Not having a spare, it'd cost me a lot more than that to replace my keyboard. Gulp. Better get one...