In a competitive market, economic profit can be positive in the short run but will be driven to zero in the long run. FOSS is but one of many competitive forces. It just so happens that thee long-run state is when profit equals marginal cost, and for software that is zero ("free")
That is a hard theory to sell, since it happens only in places where the FOSS has established dominance and (for example) the state of the top contender is horrible. There is simply no economic incentive to pursue a better debugger.
Yet Microsoft does so in Visual Studio, and apps like IDA Pro exist and are quite expensive. And there's a whole lot of proprietary ARM debugging platforms.
Even in FOSS there is also lldb and edb.
(And gdb can be made more palatable by a front end such as ddd.)
Comments
In a competitive market, economic profit can be positive in the short run but will be driven to zero in the long run. FOSS is but one of many competitive forces. It just so happens that thee long-run state is when profit equals marginal cost, and for software that is zero ("free")
That is a hard theory to sell, since it happens only in places where the FOSS has established dominance and (for example) the state of the top contender is horrible. There is simply no economic incentive to pursue a better debugger.
Yet Microsoft does so in Visual Studio, and apps like IDA Pro exist and are quite expensive. And there's a whole lot of proprietary ARM debugging platforms.
Even in FOSS there is also lldb and edb. (And gdb can be made more palatable by a front end such as ddd.)