I would like to encourage everybody that does not like the new licensing scheme of JetBrains to band together and produce either an open source product that is as polished so it can be used for free or, alternatively to take this apparently huge business opportunity and run with it.
I never quite understood what makes people that make 100's of thousands of dollars per year so cheap that they would balk at paying a few hundred $ for their main tool of choice.
Looking at a moderately tooled up wood or metalworking shop you'd be looking at a very large multiple for the main tools + accessories without a hope to make the kind of money we can make in software.
Many people are quite happy to pay for their tools, what they do not want is to be forced into a situation when it is pay for the tools this month or lose access to them.
Jetbrains could have avoided all this negative backslash by keeping the current licencing scheme in place and adding the subscription service as an option.
Again, think of it like buying a DVD over renting it on Netflix, most likely Netflix would be the cheaper option as with the exception of children's movies most movies/shows are not watched more than twice/thrice.
However we want to feel the ownership of something.
We do not want to be told that we must pay $5 for this exquisite hammer this month or be forced to go back to a 3 year old hammer.
To continue the analogy, most woodworker's tools are 1) well over three years old, and 2) have consumable components which cost well over Jetbrain's highest subscription cost every year.
Not to mention, once purchased, a woodworker won't get upgrades to their tools, or have problems with them fixed as part of their ongoing cost.
Consider it a contribution to a team whose tools you obviously enjoy, to ensure both that updates keep coming and you're not stuck with a three year old tool because Jetbrains couldn't afford to stay in business.
If the problem is low revenue, they should just raise prices and be honest about it.
I mean, if you're already paying £100 for an IDE despite the wealth of free alternatives, you do it for a reason: because it's worth it. There might be a price point where it stops being worth it, but it's likely not £120 or even £200. You're already competing with free, so price is likely not much of a differentiator already.
Instead, they try to achieve a relatively modest increase by shoving a forced and fairly unjustified SaaS model down their existing customers' throats. That leaves a bad taste, so to speak. Instead of driving sales with innovation, they now drive it with fear (your tool will stop working! pay now!).
> they try to achieve a relatively modest increase
Looking at their (current) pricing model for this, it seems like a drive for more predictable income, instead of additional profit. The ability to depend on getting X dollars per month makes it a lot easier to hire employees on, and justify working on the products.
And for many folks, Jetbrains will be getting less money out of them, since they're offering quite a deal for anyone who works with more than one of the products.
> fairly unjustified SaaS model
Except that they are providing constant, incremental upgrades to their tools as part of the model. That alone acts as fairly strong justification for a subscription model.
> Instead of driving sales with innovation, they now drive it with fear
Anybody who fears being unable to pay a $20 monthly bill is very unlikely to have paid $200 up front for the tool in the first place. Double that for any company who fears this new cost; they're already ponying up over ten grand per employee, another $20 isn't going bankrupt them.
To go back to the woodworker analogy - the woodworker who can't afford to replace the worn blade in their bandsaw has bigger problems than the monthly cost of consumables.
Anybody who fears being unable to pay a $20 monthly bill is very unlikely to have paid $200 up front for the tool in the first place.
I avoid subscription software not because of the price, but because if I stop paying or the company goes out of business the software stops working. Say I completely change industries, then ten years later I want to go back and look at my old projects. If I was using a subscription (IDE|audio editor|DAW|video editor), I won't be able to preserve my historic work.
For some proprietary formats (such as Microsoft Word, PDFs, or photoshop PSD files), this is absolutely the case. However, when it comes to code, the format is _unicode text_. There's very little danger of losing your code to the sands of time because a company whose product you used to write that _unicode text_ went out of business.
Of course, businesses are realizing danger and are publishing specs to their proprietary file formats as well, so even in 50 years someone can re-create a document which would have previously been lost. For example, https://www.adobe.com/devnet-apps/photoshop/fileformatashtml...
An IDE is not just a text editor. There is a nontrivial amount of configuration that goes in a build system, and the IDE takes care of some of it. Having to ditch the IDE often means having to manually reconfigure a good chunk of the build system, as well as tracking down the exact version of build tools the IDE was shipping with in a particular release.
And this just for IDEs. Intellij also ship a lot of tools (youtrack etc) which may or may not be replaceable without significant data loss.
Note that YouTrack and other tools are not moving to subscription licensing, only the IDEs are.
Pretty much everyone has their project set up to be able to build via an external tool for CI anyway. I'm really not seeing the lock-in argument here, except that moving back to Eclipse would be painful for a lot of people. But I don't see why you would go through that pain now if you're currently happy with what you get from JetBrains for the money that you're paying.
> Jetbrains could have avoided all this negative backslash by keeping the current licencing scheme in place and adding the subscription service as an option.
Thats what Visual Paradigm did with their Visual UML product.
>I never quite understood what makes people that make 100's of thousands of dollars per year so cheap that they would balk at paying a few hundred $ for their main tool of choice.
You make an assumption that we developers make hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. That may be true in some places and for some fortunate people but it's not true everywhere.
Besides, the main complaint I see here is that the subscription model makes all your code assets hostage to JetBrains' fortunes, since the moment they go out of existence all the software you depend on stops working. People are not balking at the thought of paying a few hundred dollars for a tool - they are, in fact, asking for the opportunity to do just that.
I think it's the idea that their favorite lathe maker no longer lets them buy a lathe., only rent. If you stop paying for your lathe, someone comes into your shop and disables it.
They would tend to own a lot of these tools. As in their spanner or their CNC mill does not phone home and then stop working if they fail to keep paying the monthly rent on it.
I never quite understood what makes people that make 100's of thousands of dollars per year so cheap that they would balk at paying a few hundred $ for their main tool of choice.
Looking at a moderately tooled up wood or metalworking shop you'd be looking at a very large multiple for the main tools + accessories without a hope to make the kind of money we can make in software.