It's my personal opinion that one only gets complaining rights if one doesn't use Gmail, one doesn't subscribe to NetFlix, one doesn't use Spotify, ad nauseum.
That does not make sense. Spotify et al. were like that from the beginning. You know what kind of deal you are getting. JetBrains is changing the rules of the game completely, with very little heads-up time, for people who might be deeply invested in their products.
It's comparable to what Adobe pulled off: they knew that most people did not have a choice, so they could force it on them. Luckily, the IDE landscape is a bit more healthy, so I expect that a subset of their customers will flee to other IDEs.
On top of that, it's the difference between monthly costs for the company. Netflix, Spotify and Gmail all have monthly costs in terms of storage space, bandwidth usage, server maintenance, etc that users are directly affecting. You're paying for the content to always be available, to be available quickly and to not have limits on what you can and can't access.
Desktop software on the other hand has no direct monthly costs other than phoning home once a month. You could definitely argue that iterating development costs should be factored in here, I can't imagine that being a deciding factor in moving completely to this business model. I'm sure if they offered a low cost monthly subscription and a perpetual license option, they wouldn't have any issue offsetting development costs. At this point, they could even raise the price of perpetual license (hell, I seem to remember paying $200 for mine). I'd gladly pay an increased price with the knowledge that my software wouldn't stop working, especially given how many hours of productivity I gain by using their software.
>> the IDE landscape is a bit more healthy, so I expect that a subset of their customers will flee to other IDEs.
Agreed.
I dropped most of Adobe's products after they went to a subscription based model. The only product I still use is Photoshop and I'm planning on dropping that later this year so I can move 100% to Linux.
For the record, over 95% of the front-end devs I know use Sublime Text for their IDE.
I just have to add, I just tried to install ReSharper 8.1 in VS 2015 (since I bought 8.1 last year), and it doesn't work. So yeah, JetBrains is already doing these Jackass-like slimy tactics with their perpetual licensing, when there isn't really any reason why they should restrict it to VS 2013.
It looks like even when you purchase a ReSharper license, the software will work for about a year. So subscriptions aren't that much worse.
I use IntelliJ, phpStorm and pyCharm all on a regular business. But I work for a university and just assume that the subscriptions won't lapse. That may be a bad assumption given that I control the departments budget and it would come out of my allocations if the cost go up. Mixed feelings on this change. But I really like the three products I use and will continue to use them.
If you regularly use/upgrade lots of their products then this new scheme should work out cheaper. The people who potentially lose out are the people who only used one of their cheaper products and people who go several years without upgrading.
Or, if you are on their flagship product (IntelliJ IDEA). Sure, you save a whopping 10 Euro per year. But suddenly, you have a subscription rather than owning a perpetual license. Sounds like a bad deal.
How exactly do you think more "heads-up time" would improve the situation? Either you are gonna stick with JetBrains and their product, in which case heads-up is irrelevant, or you are gonna switch to a competing product, in which case heads-up wouldn't help either: you will still need to learn the new product, regardless of when you switch.
If you want to stay on a perpetual licenses for a little longer (to see how everything pans out), you now have to buy it within two months and not at your planned upgrade term, otherwise you lose that option.
Another benefit of more time would be that in a corporation where purchases are not as simple as pulling the trigger, you have some time to do the paperwork to get the subscription approved, while still continuing in the current update scheme until then.
That does not make sense. Spotify et al. were like that from the beginning. You know what kind of deal you are getting. JetBrains is changing the rules of the game completely, with very little heads-up time, for people who might be deeply invested in their products.
It's comparable to what Adobe pulled off: they knew that most people did not have a choice, so they could force it on them. Luckily, the IDE landscape is a bit more healthy, so I expect that a subset of their customers will flee to other IDEs.