As soon as one participant decides to give it away for free to increase market share, then every participant must do the same. So the cost of intellectual property goes to zero, and everyone now competes in a decidedly less lucrative market of service contracts.
Depends on the target audience, there is plenty of business opportunities with developer tooling when targeting corporations.
From my point of view, and a bit sour experience as well, if you want to charge money for developer tools that is the market you should focus on.
Developer tools is a broad term. My subjective opinion:
* If you mean code libraries (e.g. a licensing model)? I don’t think a lot of people would pay for that these days.
* Managed solutions for sure, most developers and small companies are happy to outsource anything that reeks of devops.
* IDEs etc, yup worth every penny.