this post was submitted on 15 Jan 2025
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The issue here is that it's just a library that makes testing assertions a little nicer. It's not some super important library that developers get huge productivity gains with.
The author has sold the rights to the project to a commercial entity - Xceed who's now selling it for $130 per dev - $130 for a library that just makes your unit tests assertions a little nicer! It's an insane price, I have no idea how they've come up with that. That's IDE licence territory.
A part of me is starting to think that this is actually a stunt to raise brand awareness of Xceed more than anything else.
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.
I know what you mean but I also think we're very fortunate for the value for money we get from IDEs.
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.
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.
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.
Related - I was teaching at a school where I wanted them to get some plagiarism tool. The charge was per student. It was a newish school with a lot of growth, and another new school was still being built nearby (not being put into service for another year or two), so the school had A LOT of students (nearly 2 school's worth), so, they couldn't afford it. I ended up having to manually copy some of my student's code and then Google it to see if they had copied it from anywhere (and yes, some of them had. BTW the most hilarious poor effort at trying to cheat was one who's code not only didn't even compile, but they hadn't even bothered changing the Imperial measurements to Metric! Didn't even need to Google that one - here's your letter to parents 😂).