Java: the barriers of entry are ridiculously low

It came to my mind as I was just eating lunch: the barriers of entry to starting a software development business are getting ridiculously low these days. The only expensive things you need are skills, a decade of experience and a willingness to meet new people.

As an example, I have three computers at home, just for redundancy. The latest addition cost me €600 for an Acer Aspire E380 with an AMD64 dual core processor, 2GB of memory and a 320GB disk. My other two computers cost a couple hundred euros more per computer, but they are a bit more silent. You can reasonably run a software business with two home computers. I use the third to test things like new Solaris versions with DTrace and ZFS that really need to run on bare iron, and as beta stuff, might not necessarily play nice with other products.

For effective Eclipse use, I bought a 22" widescreen monitor for €400. Had I gone with a good Acer AL2216WSD instead of the best Samsung 226bw, I would have saved €150 on that too. Having a good monitor is extremely important, and having a widescreen monitor really pays off when working with modern IDE's.

I have both an ADSL and a cable Internet connection, again for redundancy. I monitor the lines, and in the last 3 or so years there's only been a single one hour time period when both lines have been down at the same time. A fast ADSL line and a fast cable connection together cost around €80 a month, maximum.

For servers, I'm enrolled in the Amazon S3 and EC2 programs, and I can easily start up as many servers as I need in a few minutes. No need for costly infrastructure investments. Since gigabytes of transfer and storage cost peanuts (literally ten cents an hour and gigabyte,) I can easily fund whatever I need from my Pepsi cola budget until the customers pay the first bills. For external version control, I can use services such as CVSDude, or just set up an EC2 server that automatically backs itself up on S3.

Since the Acer E380 disk was partitioned in two, I just installed Ubuntu Feisty Fawn 64bit on the empty partition, and kept the original Windows Vista on the other. Installing Ubuntu was a breeze, unlike the process of initializing the "pre-installed" Windows Vista that took hours.

After that, I downloaded and installed the 64-bit JDK 1.6 from Sun, downloaded and installed Eclipse, its JEE plugins and Subclipse, Glassfish and some other tools. You can tell the Ubuntu system to apt-get all of these tools automatically, with just one apt-get, but I like to use the newest JDK and application servers to check on my desktop whether the newest bug fixes and features have any adverse effect on my stuff before they get installed on any servers.

The free VMWare Server and Player products take care of any virtualization needs that the Amazon EC2 service doesn't cover.

After that, if you know how to develop good software, you're home golden. If you don't, all the money in the world won't help you.