Difference between investing money and wasting money

[d000hg]

Somebody who brings in £750 in a day and a bit, and knows that ultimately it takes longer than that scrabbling around on the internet and stepping through overcomplicated source code to get the open source version working.

If you think OS means having to hack the code or even download the source-code, you don't know it well. Some projects are like that, especially in the *nix world, but all the popular widely used applications have nice friendly installers like a normal app.

I thought Eclipse was a poor man's IDE for Java? The Java'ists I've worked with all say Eclipse isn't very good, but I don't know from first hand experience.

Eclipse is probably closest to a standard for Java development. Java is so entrenched in open-source that nearly all the 'proper' tools ARE OS... SVN, ANT, etc. Remember these are tools developers write for themselves and therefore they generally are pretty good.
Eclipse & NetBeans are the two most common ones, both free and both pretty good (maybe not as good as VS C#, but better than VS C++). IntelliJ is THE big paid Java IDE but is relatively rare from my experience... every place I worked that used java (including IBs developing core products) used Eclipse/NetBeans and free VCS/build/deployment tools.

[thunderlizard]

OK, I should probably have said "to understand how to use them properly" rather than "to get them working". The main open source projects I've used have been NHibernate and Lucene.NET. For both of them I started off with the compiled DLL, but then had to use the source code instead. That was due both to bugs that had been fixed in the latest source code release but not the latest compiled package; and to odd errors with unhelpful messages (usually NullReferenceExceptions) where it eventually turned out, after stepping down several layers, I was calling things wrongly.

[d000hg]

Fair enough... but talking frameworks and libraries I think you often get those problems when using a proprietary alternative, unless it's a massive company throwing $millions at testing.

[doodab]

I have found with some open source stuff you have to read the source to make up for the lack of detail in the documentation. A lot of the time it's not clear why it doesn't behave as you would expect from the manual or you need to read it to understand how to extend it.

Still, I get paid to do it so what do I care?