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 [email protected], 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 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.
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
I plan to build something less limited to the traditional spreadsheet UI though. Same concept but more flexible UI, so that for example you may process image data by manipulating pixels as cells.
BTW, what were the main difficulties/problems in implementing your project using spreadsheets?
I assume that one of these was having to write Ruby scripts to connect things together instead of working directly with your data sources, was there anything else?
Seeing smartest people waste their time on this was very depressing for me during 3 years spent there.