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14

I'm fairly sure that it'll be VERY hard to make money selling a product that has a dozen or so free alternatives, including one from the official maintainers. The company I work for is faced with that issue: a couple years ago a free alternative for our product appeared and now we're faced with heavy competition.

Nzall
– Nzall

2020-03-16 20:56:37 +00:00
Commented Mar 16, 2020 at 20:56
6

@Nzall Occasionally it is possible to thrive by excellence. JetBrains can do this with their products.

Thorbjørn Ravn Andersen
– Thorbjørn Ravn Andersen

2020-03-17 09:18:38 +00:00
Commented Mar 17, 2020 at 9:18
@ThorbjørnRavnAndersen Though to be fair, NetBeans, one of the most popular Java IDEs, has had such major blunders in the past (e.g. not running on the latest java version, etc.) that it's not surprizing people would rather go for paid options.

MechMK1
– MechMK1

2020-03-17 19:13:36 +00:00
Commented Mar 17, 2020 at 19:13
1

@mechMK netbeans has done surprisingly well given that Oracle already had a Java ide before they acquired Sun. The blunders happened when Netbeans was finally orphaned by oracle and they had to migrate to Apache requiring full open source. That same move stalled Java development for years back around Java 6. But to be frank, the de facto free java ide today is eclipse (backed by IBM).

Thorbjørn Ravn Andersen
– Thorbjørn Ravn Andersen

2020-03-17 20:29:37 +00:00
Commented Mar 17, 2020 at 20:29
4

@AndresF. I don't think that contradicts what Nzall wrote. He didn't rule it out, he merely said it will be "very hard". What you've described is indeed hard. You'd have to put in the work to come up with a complete implementation and find optimisations that are missing from all the free alternatives and find buyers for your product.

Jon Bentley
– Jon Bentley

2020-03-17 21:31:33 +00:00
Commented Mar 17, 2020 at 21:31

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