Sure but it pays very handsomely to make up for the boringness. I'm already bored/soul-crushed at startups - so I'd be much happier to be bored and getting paid a lot more for it. Politics still seem ridiculous even at the startups I've been at.
About 'correctness' and 'small size' ... as soon as they'd add unittests as extensive as V8, JSCore, or SpiderMonkey, it'd grow big quite dramatically. :-)
I'd be interested to see how ES5-compliant MuJS really is. My guess is probably different from what they claim.
State of the art development workflows fail to utilize possibilities of high-resolution 2d displays (using concepts are rooted in times of plaintext terminals). So I don't see VR coming to programming any time soon.
I own small consultancy and am an iOS / OS X developer myself. We are in Ukraine, so 10k / year goes much further here.
We can help you with support, e.g. for percentage of sales. Or we can negotiate other deal. Drop me a line to vgrichina@gmail.com, let's discuss the details.
IMO the problem isn't that there are less resources dedicated to open source stuff than to commercial projects. The problem is that there is much less effort and especially polish dedicated to any not user facing aspescts of software. Internal libraries are almost certainly even more half-baked and full of shitty code than most open source projects.
I feel like I need to make the obligitory comment. If you want an editor that is scriptable with Lisp and supports Textmate bundles, and Vim keybindings; Emacs[0] + Evil mode[1] (Extensible Vi layer, it's great) + Yasnippet[2] (Yet annother snippet library, has textmate bundles).
I switched from vim to this setup a while ago and have to say I've been very happy with it. I like the advantage of having a full language to use and find the environment more customisable (maybe just because I never got fully comfortable with VimScript. That being said, I still use vim for quickly editing single files as you can't beat the startup time.
alias e='TERM=xterm-256color emacsclient -t'
alias ec='emacsclient -c'
alias ed='emacs --daemon'
in my .zshrc to do just that but for some reason I use vim anyway, due to it's omnipresence on every server box I go into and I suppose muscle memory of typing vim whatever_file_i_want_to_edit .
Vico is amazing, I'm currently working on contributing to it. Highly recommended, and it's simple to build too. Go get the version from GitHub, it's now open source and managed by the community.
Got your point about being less technical. Also I agree that project is currently more about research than building actual product.
(1) There are 2 main pain points: 1) for programmers it is building and debugging systems in non-interactive way; 2) for non-programmers is building contraptions using Excel and bubble gum – see some discussion on that here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7363824
About (2) I think programmers don't buy development tools any more. They use open source or maybe free tools. Only Microsoft might still be able to have people pay for Visual Studio (but that's because they own Windows).
Either your project should be open source or it should be aimed at non-programmers like finance or accounting people.
I think the best plan might be to create an open source tool first and then, when the product start to be good enough, sell special packages around it for finance/accounting.
I think you are using a massive brush to paint all "programmers" here. There are many types of programmers working on many types of software. Many if us buy dev tools. There are not open source equivalents for everything
I think even more important question is "what essential dev tools you've purchased that had some sort of open source equivalent".
As for me, last thing I remember – I've purchased http://theolabrothers.com/sip/ when is wasn't free. And it is just a simple tool I don't require at all (any image editor can be used instead), it is just much more convenient than any other alternative.
My current plan is to make runtime platform open-source, but sell hosted development tools as SaaS.
While software developers don't usually buy platform stuff like compilers, libraries etc – they are usually more than willing to buy products that make things simple. Otherwise companies like GitHub or (my own product – Hosted CI) won't get any revenue.
Seeing smartest people waste their time on this was very depressing for me during 3 years spent there.