Sure, using Eclipse is free.
Slamming my head against a cement wall is too.
I'm equally likely to do either on the weekend when I'm not paid to. My weekend time is too valuable to put up with such a painful programming environment.
Responsive UI, attention to detail, ease of use—these things help make programming comfortable and fun, and Ruby development has that in spades.
Personally, I'm not interested in the varying methods that big game houses can extract revenue from their sweatshop produced big titles. I want to know about the future of Open Source game development, and where that'll go in the next decade. The Linux kernal and other big projects prove that large, complex projects can be accomplished under the FOSS model.
The problem with this is that open source tends to excel at function and suck at polish. Despite excellent function, most OSS developers can't develop an interface or decent icon artwork to save their lives. It's just not where their strength lies. Now, for many applications - compressing video, burning a CD, etc, this is something that we can easily live with. Our goal in using the app is to complete a task and so long as the task gets completed then everyone is happy.
I think this is ready to change. The field of User Interface Design is really only starting to blossom. Programming has been around for a few decades now. Once UID becomes as mainstream as programming is, there will be many more designers and architects with the same incentives to build free software as there are programmers now. We're just not there yet.
Rarely do I see a bunch of programmers arguing for months or years over exactly what a particular piece of software documentation means, how it applies in particular situations etc.
No? Then you've clearly never written an application for the Web. There's been a ten year argument about what "JavaScript" means, and they still haven't figured it out.
In the sciences, we are now uniquely priviledged to sit side by side with the giants on whose shoulders we stand. -- Gerald Holton
