The thing is Bob can use HammerAsAService™ to put in a nail. It is so cheap! Way cheaper than buying an actual hammer.

The problem with unlearning generic tools and relying on ones you rent by big corporations is that it is unreliable in the long term. The prices will be rising. The conditions will worsen. Oh nice that Bob made a thing using HammerAsAService™, but the terms of conditions (changing once a week) he accepted last week clearly say it belongs to the company now. Bob should be happy they are not suing him yet, but Bob isn't sure whether the thing that came out a month after was independently developed by that company or not just a clone of his work. Bob wishes he knew how to use a hammer.

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thepasch 2 hours ago | parent [-]

The majority of nails people might want to rent a HammerAsAService for these days can already easily be put in by open source hammers you can run on consumer, uh… workbenches.

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Peritract 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Not to stretch the metaphor too far, but those workbenches require understanding (and hammers) to set up.

Will the paid tools always tell their users how to use the free versions, and if not, how will the users learn to do it independently?

	▲	thepasch an hour ago \| parent [-]
		> Will the paid tools always tell their users how to use the free versions, and if not, how will the users learn to do it independently? The same way any open-source infrastructure finds widespread use, I’d say. If you’re willing to put in the elbow grease, you can probably set it up yourself (maybe even with the help of one of the frontier, uh, hammers, in its free tier). Or there might be services that act as middlemen to make it all more convenient and cheaper. But the difference is that if Service X pisses you off, then there will be Services Y, Z, A, and B who sell the same service using the same open-source infrastructure, so you always have a choice. If you don’t like GitHub, try Gitlab, Codeberg, Gitea, and so forth. Or Bitbucket or Azure DevOps. (Don’t actually, though.)