>>>A dead horse I know, but I decided to post this to my blog anyway:
>>>
>>>http://weblogs.foxite.com/joel_leach/archive/2011/10/13/14703.aspx
>>
>>Nice summation.
>>
>>Accidentally, I just wrote this today. Which proves to be a part of the same trend: Microsoft (and Apple and a few others) think that tools like Fox, where you invest a few hundred bucks and you can do anything you want, should not exist. Want to be a programmer? Either work for a corporation, which will buy developer tools in the same order of $ magnitude as the developers' salaries combined, or fork out a few thousand and hope that it's not all obsolete by the time you got a distributable product. They don't really care whether you sell anything, unless you sell a lot. Then they'll try to buy you, steal from you, or just develop a piece of crap that looks nicer and does more or less the same thing as yours (actually, far less) and you sue them if you feel like.
>>
>>The small players are to be consumers of tools, not real players.
>
>I don't know. My sense is open source tools and developers who know how to use them are in demand at the moment.

That's the view from the other side. I was describing the side which said "you'll have to buy all your tools from us, and sell your wares through us, because we're the only game in town". Of course, they only say so, and publicly pretend that the open source side doesn't mean much.