8 comments

2

As of November 2, 2015, we will introduce JetBrains Toolbox—a collection of our popular desktop tools (IDEs, utilities and extensions) available on a monthly or yearly subscription basis.

The revolt is, no pay no developers tool. Aka ransom ware: pay or else we take away your developers tools.

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The reason why this is a stupid idea is this:

  • Subscription means DRM, DRM means a hole in the enterprise firewall.
  • Subscription means: I am in deep trouble if my company digs out that project from 4 years ago and asks me to fix a tiny bug
  • Subscription means, developments tools failure if you are a Greek citizen that can't pay your taxes anymore.
  • Most developers in big companies actually have their personal license, because it takes years before the company decide to purchase it. A subscription is definitely not a good idea. Especially when you have a dead in the water project because they ran out of budget this year. In big companies it can take many months even years before you get a go to update to the newest one. Especially when your are in teams the size of 100+. Visual Studio 2010 is still massively used because of this. Code that could not be migrated because they depend on libraries of companies that do not exist anymore.
  • Jetbrains can go broke in a couple of years. Especially now that developers revolt and do not trust Jetbrains anymore. Your project is a sitting duck when they power off their DRM severs.
  • Subscription means that Jetbrains is not motived anymore to create new and exciting tools. They got your money, so they stop caring.
0

Well, that's disappointing. There's always sublime text I guess.

1

Do it! You won't be disappointed. I never knew how much I loved programming until all my variables were pink. sublime3+package manager is the best!

0

$20/mo is pretty steep, although I only use PHPStorm, so I guess $8 a month wouldn't be THAT terrible.

1

The issue is the ransom ware. Stop paying and you lose your tools.

If your project is tiny, then there is no issue, but if your project space multiple developers for years...

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The licenses were already yearly. It's not that much of a difference since most companies will purchases yearly subscriptions anyway. Also, it's not ransomware. Your code won't magically disappear or get encrypted or anything.

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It's not that much of a difference since most companies will purchases yearly subscriptions anyway.

That won't happen at all. Companies don't like yearly subscriptions at all. Especially not the big ones I have worked for.