Posted by kretaceous 10/24/2024
It's a bootstrapped, European company, doing $400M+ annually in revenue selling to developers (who are some of the most difficult buyers to convenience to pay).
Somehow VS Code tried to swing me away from it, but it just never ever came close to whatever JetBrains could offer. And it's only going to keep getting better. It's great that it's now free for non-commercial usage. And when I really work on projects that make money, I don't mind paying $100 a year anyway.
A colleague of mine at work, who is almost retirement age now and has 10+ years on me in the industry told me that the ONLY reason he uses VSCode is because it's free.
I'm with you, there are IntelliJ features (particularly the refactoring features that I use all the time and couldn't live without) that I just take for granted. And when I watch other devs do things the hard way in VSCode I wonder why it's is so popular. I think most devs just either don't know what they are missing, or it just comes down to cost.
I also often chuckle when people say "Oh there's a VSCode plugin that can do that." I'm not certain, but I don't think I've ever installed a single plugin in IntelliJ because it just does everything I need out of the box.
This is exactly the reason. When people use both VSCode and Jetbrains IDEs, a huge portion of them will end up becoming a Jetbrains user, and on someday, some of them can become paying customers
VSCode infrastructure is pretty broad and the community is pretty large. I only use it to make light code edits here and there but I would never put my whole project in it.
>>I've ever installed a single plugin in IntelliJ because it just does everything I need out of the box. Same here, the only plugins I installed were themes :)
And who more often than not get their software imposed on by the orgs they work in, so it's doubly complicated - the developers have to be convinced themselves enough to be willing to convince their IT department/fellow developers to pay for.
Companies (depending on jurisdiction) are not allowed to make employees pay for items necessary for work.
And allowing employees to pay can easily be misinterpreted into subtly pressuring employees to pay.
Some bigger orgs allow flexibility (devs can pick Mac or Linux-based laptops, VS Code or JetBrains as the IDE, etc.), but not bring your own with your own license.
Compared to their alternatives like Eclipse, Visual Studio etc I think they're a huge step up. If you're a fan of simpler tools like vim, emacs or vscode etc I can see that they may not be to your taste, but I think their products are great. They're easy to get started with, powerful when you learn to use them, relatively bug free and I'd say they significantly boost my productivity.
All of whom, strangely, expect to be paid for their work.
Sure, some minority of people are just greedy and rude. I think most people aren't. As far as being stingy goes, I believe I have paid more for software so far than most people will in their entire life time by probably multiples and I'm happy to continue to do so, and I will also be on every thread about a CLA rug-pull as well, because BS is BS, no two ways about it.
You're conflating 2 different things together. I don't think most people are rude. I think most people are greedy.
As far as "most people are greedy" goes, that really comes down to how you quantify "greed" and I really think we're better off agreeing to disagree on this point.
> The portion of respondents who reported they are unpaid hobbyists remains at 60 percent, the same as in last year's survey.
Only 12% checked "I'm a semi-professional maintainer, and earn most of my income from maintaining projects." 24% checked "some of my income from maintaining projects"
Are those projects the size of Jetbrains IDEs - e.g. Linux kernel, ffmpeg, VIM, Emacs, etc. ?
I used to think I'd just use free open-source software until I became a developer myself.
Now, I believe people should be compensated for their work, even open-source developers who contribute their time and skills for free.
I think you meant Enterprise software that can cost a lot. a developer can't afford that.
I personally have enough buying power to afford it, and it's more than paid for itself over the years by giving me a leg up over coworkers who try to make do with free tools. People I work with think I have some superhuman ability to navigate, understand, and modify huge codebases and don't believe me when I tell them that it's just because I learned how to use JetBrains IDEs fluently.
[0] This is explicitly allowed: https://sales.jetbrains.com/hc/en-gb/articles/207240855-Can-...
Citation very much needed?
Unless you're talking about enterprise software specifically, developers are probably among the most willing to shell out cash for software, it's the general public who seems to be fine with ad-ridden spyware freemium nonsense as long as it's free.
And pretty much all major programming languages and libraries are given away for free too. Someone tries to introduce BitKeeper, a commercial version control system, for the Linux kernel? They won't stand for it, some's gotta clone it and give the clone away for free.
Hell, I've heard loads of people here on HN complaining when a SaaS company introduces features exclusively useful to large corporations - like single-sign-on integration - then wants to get paid for them.
There's a handful of exceptions. For example game developers will pay $$$ for "Unity" and store their assets in "Perforce" and suchlike. And I believe it's possible to pay for Visual Studio.
Free-libre is necessarily also free-costless, but not the other way round.
> Visual Studio
It's interesting that everywhere I've worked as a Microsoft shop happily pays for MSDN, which gives you not just VS but a huge amount of other stuff.
Perforce handles large binary assets much better than git. There are also paid for closed version control systems that are really bad but get used anyway, such as in IC design.
Source: Myself
Unrelatedly, there's also to some extent an expectation that everything is free, even for commercial users. The most common pricing question I get about my product is "can't you make it free for commercial projects that don't have revenue yet", i.e. effectively asking me to become investors in their own venture. Because often they want to make a product company, but not spend any money to do so.
Source: I run a small software company that sells to developers.
It’s more complicated than “developers are cheap”. They understand software complexity, and when paying is justified. They know what a clear online grift looks like. They have and make free software. I’m happy to pay the JetBrains subscription because it’s actually good enough to warrant the price. You can’t trick a carpenter into buying a poorly build and/or overpriced cabinet by putting a fancy handle on it.
I guess it depends on what you consider a "Russian Company".
As a British national living in the USA, does that mean if I start a company it'll be a "British Company" forevermore?
The heavily populated parts of Russia, including the part where JetBrains was operating, are in Europe. (Russia’s not part of the EU, obviously, but “European” and “EU” don’t mean the same thing.)
It will be very interesting to see the effects of that brain drain long term.
What has NATO to do with Russian invasion of Ukraine?
His war has turned the world upside down in a lot of ways, and I really do feel for the Russians and Ukrainians who he's dragged down with him. I have coworkers who regularly have to take shelter from his bombing campaigns.
https://blog.jetbrains.com/blog/2022/12/06/update-on-jetbrai...
> The Czech Republic is a member of the United Nations, NATO, the European Union, the OECD, the OSCE, the Council of Europe and the Visegrád Group.
"You agree that the product will send usage data to validate your compliance with the license terms and anonymous feature usage statistics..."
"The information collected under Sections 4.1. and 4.2. may include but is not limited to frameworks, file templates used in the Product, actions invoked, and other interactions with the Product’s features."
Not just that, they will do some yucky things to exfiltrate data from your network to enforce this.
I do have a few gripes though. I wish the performance was better on my current setup on my M2 MBP. It is an awful experience when tools get in your way and break your flow. The file sync to MacOS is fairly laggy and new files that are created can take seconds to appear. UI interactions can be laggy. Sometimes invoking the context sensitive intentions/actions is blocking where it will hang for seconds. I need to keep my movements fluid to keep my train of thoughts on the track and not be derailed by my ADD.
I also would like a plug-in system that wasn't entirely on Kotlin, Groovy and Java. I did Groovy dev in a past life but it's painful for me today. Thankfully ChatGPT gets me most of the way there. I wish there were JS/TS bindings to build upon.
Overall, I'm pleased with JetBrains. I appreciate their content they put out on YouTube to further empower the developers that use their products with knowledge and guidance of efficiencies. I'll continue using it as my core IDE for the foreseeable future. I have augmented my flow with a bit of Cursor but JetBrains is the bread and butter.
These days I am mostly using NeoVim.
I decided today to stop supporting JetBrains BECAUSE there is no good kotlin language server.
I would gladly pay them money even if I don't use their IDEs if only they provided a good language server.
They’ve been awful stewards of the language despite investing so much into it.
A kotlin project paid my bills for a long time, so I am totally fine investing 200bucks/year.
But I don't want to use IdeaVim anymore, I want the real deal NeoVim, configured how I love it!