Yesterday I commented on the release of ActiveState Komodo IDE 4.0 and mentioned that I’m apparently no longer the market for their product due to its price.

Three ActiveState employees were kind enough to take the time to leave some comments on that post attempting to clarify the situation, and to provide some assurance that Komodo Edit will indeed be free for the foreseeable future. Very cool. It’s always a good sign for a company when they take the time to respond to comments about their products.

That said, I’m not sure that releasing Komodo Edit for free really changes things much. Komodo’s editor is nice enough, but there’s no shortage of editors… including some rather nice F/OSS ones. What made Komodo appealing was the easy-to-use debugger that allowed you to quickly run and test Python scripts without switching applications. Without at least some form of debugging, it’s just another editor (albeit a very nice one).

I guess my feeling is that at $35 Komodo Personal was an absolute steal for a top notch Python IDE, and I recommended it to those in #python looking for an easier way to code. In fact, I would have gladly paid almost twice that much for it. But at $245 (or $295!) I find it hard to imagine that anyone other than businesses and/or those who code for a living would pay for it.

ActiveState has always seemed to me to be a good company, and one that has done a lot to promote Python as a language. I truly hope this is a good decision on their part, because I’d like nothing more than to see them succeed…

…but I know at least one person that won’t be upgrading to 4.0.

Related Post: Komodo IDE is really expensive

Elsewhere: Some kind words for Komodo here and here.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 31st, 2007 at 12:23 am and is filed under Programming, Software. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.