Developers do hate paying for things, but that doesn't mean you cant make a business selling to them. You just need to make a much more compelling offering than they could reasonably create themselves.
For example, my company (https://circleci.com) makes Continuous-integration-as-a-service, marketed directly to developers. We have a lot of companies using us with incredible engineers (Stripe and Zencoder are 2 obvious examples who have agreed to be listed on our homepage, we have many more). Why - when they can build it themselves? Because we have built a compelling product that is much better than they could do themselves (and in many cases they tried)!
To give you one example, one customer has a test suite that takes 60 minutes on his laptop. He just pushes to Circle when he wants to test, and he gets a result in 13 minutes (blazing fast build servers, plus automatic parallelization)! That would overload a single build server, so they'd have to get a cluster set up. That sounds like fun , but only for the first hour.
cool, what versions of ghc? (or is it haskell platform only?)
(I am doing some 7.6.* heavy work, and thats ignoring occasionally playing with just patching GHC itself! :) )
1) does that give a path towards users providing their own *.deb bundles and thus being able to use their own choice in compiler versions?
2) part 1 is a bit important, I may be doing a lot of dev work against ghc head (or patched versions thereof) in the coming months (though not for another 2-4 months realistically), and unless i can a la carte plug in the ghc version I want, i may a well roll my own thing on top of jenkins and the like :)
For example, my company (https://circleci.com) makes Continuous-integration-as-a-service, marketed directly to developers. We have a lot of companies using us with incredible engineers (Stripe and Zencoder are 2 obvious examples who have agreed to be listed on our homepage, we have many more). Why - when they can build it themselves? Because we have built a compelling product that is much better than they could do themselves (and in many cases they tried)!
To give you one example, one customer has a test suite that takes 60 minutes on his laptop. He just pushes to Circle when he wants to test, and he gets a result in 13 minutes (blazing fast build servers, plus automatic parallelization)! That would overload a single build server, so they'd have to get a cluster set up. That sounds like fun , but only for the first hour.