Subscription-based models are a plague, but at least Jetbrains products eventually offer a perpetual fallback license for if you stop paying.
It's absurd that Adobe can just take tools you might depend on away after years of paying the subscription.
this post was submitted on 12 May 2024
200 points (92.4% liked)
Programmer Humor
19512 readers
354 users here now
Welcome to Programmer Humor!
This is a place where you can post jokes, memes, humor, etc. related to programming!
For sharing awful code theres also Programming Horror.
Rules
- Keep content in english
- No advertisements
- Posts must be related to programming or programmer topics
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
The basic software like the Intellij Community Edition is also fully open source. (And it's not actually basic at all. It's a great full featured IDE)
Basically you're only paying for their support/updates and for specific language and toolkit support, which makes sense to me. They need to pay their staff somehow.
It's not comparable to Adobe or other crappy manufacturers where you own nothing.
What do you mean with perpetual fallback license?
If you stop the subscription, you don't get upgrades. But you keep whatever the last version you had, it's not locked out by a license check.
That’s good, I think that’s a much better and fairer model than being locked out completely of a thing that you did pay for.
Basically when you buy your subscription you also get perpetual access to the current X.Y.Z version + any future bugfixes (Z). So if you stop paying next year you still have access to the version from when your started your subscription.
Ah, makes sense , thanks!
If I subscribe for 10 years then can't afford it any more I'm rewarded with a 10 year old version of the software? It should be the version that was current when you finished your subscription.
as soon as you pay for 12 consecutive months, you will receive this perpetual fallback license providing you with access to the exact product version for when your 12 consecutive months subscription started.
So at most your software will be 1 year old.
That's not so bad. Thank you for the clarification.
JetBrains might not be my friend but they don't hold anywhere near the dev tool monopoly Adobe does for artists. Know what happens if JetBrains starts to blow massive ass? I finally sit down and figure out how to get my terminal editor working with my LSP. Yeah I lose some productivity but not as much as I'd lose by using Visual Studio or fuckn Eclipse.
I think another key difference is everyone can use whatever tool they like and still work on the same codebase. They don't have proprietary file formats that lock in you and your entire team forever.
Also, doesn't the jetbrains license let you continue to use the version that was the latest as of when your license ended. It's a small difference, but also kinda huge.
It's the version from when you paid your annual subscription (or 12 monthly payments ago) plus any bugfixes.
So you buy 4.3.2 and you will always have access to 4.3.Z
2 months later they release 5.0.0. Your subscription let's you use 5.0.0. If you cancel your subscription then can go back to your perpetual version 4.3.Z
At least that's how it's supposed to work
At what point do I get to keep 5.0 instead?
Assuming you keep paying, 12 months from its release if you pay monthly or you'll get a licence for whatever version is newest at the point you renew if you pay yearly
No. I know this because a couple of times my license expired, and 30 days before it does you'll just get a little warning in the IDE - or in tools like Resharper. After that it just stops working.
Iy used to he that, but they're pushing the new subscription model now and i don't think the old one can still be purchased.
If you are interested there is a great repo to get you up an running on neovim without messing with anything. I got LSP support out of the box and took me less than a week to fully transition away from vscode. It's called kickstart and is maintained by one the neovim contributors. I've done minimal tweaking months later.
donate to your favorite open source project instead!
Some JetBrains IDEs are fully open source. Does Adobe have anything like that?
Brackets, although its unmaintained
Then why is Gabe Newell on my Friends list? 😌