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JetBrains: $270M revenue, 405K paying users, $0 raised

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Re: JetBrains: $270M revenue, 405K paying users, $0 raised

#301

Post by mmastrac »

wldlyinaccurate wrote: post #278
mmastrac wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Code from the open-source nprof project made up a good chunk of dotTrace (confirmed via decompilation at the time).

Which licence did you distribute the code with? Surely there's solid grounds for a legal case if the licence didn't permit commercial use?

I wasn't really clear on licensing back then and it looks like I had a few GPL headers in the source.

EDIT: it was clearer than I thought - v0.4 [1] has an explicit GPL 2.0 COPYING.txt in the root.

[1] https://sourceforge.net/projects/nprof/files/OldFiles/nprof-...

Re: JetBrains: $270M revenue, 405K paying users, $0 raised

#302

Post by mmastrac »

kevingadd wrote: post #281
mmastrac wrote: post #254

Every time I see these guys pop up, I'm reminded of the time a decade ago where they literally copied my .NET profiler (nprof) into their "brand new" .NET profiling product at the time and just shipped it. No apologies, no compensation for building a commercial product on something I had spent a decent amount of time on. Very disappointing of them.

Pretty standard in the .NET ecosystem, unfortunately. I had a similar experience with multiple tools vendors repackaging my stuff for free as the foundation of their product. The only time I ever got a sponsorship offer or even bug fix contributions was a while after I had stopped doing their work for them for free.

Yeah. That soured me on the .NET ecosystem a lot. I was a fan of VS.NET/Resharper at the time (pretty groundbreaking). I moved on to Java/Linux over the next couple years.

Re: JetBrains: $270M revenue, 405K paying users, $0 raised

#303

Post by bitL »

rsynnott wrote: post #201
closeparen wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use Jetbrains products for everything at work. I don't know what's going to happen if I ever have to work at an Eclipse shop. Might have to turn it down, honestly.

There are Eclipse shops? In 2019? Why? I mean, even IntelliJ Community (which, despite the implications of the name, can be used for everything) is a fair bit better.

Speed in large projects. IntelliJ is super slow once you have huge source/text files. E.g. WebStorm is unusable for debugging as one step over takes ~10s on a 128GB RAM machine in such cases.

Re: JetBrains: $270M revenue, 405K paying users, $0 raised

#304

Post by enitihas »

rsynnott wrote: post #201
closeparen wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use Jetbrains products for everything at work. I don't know what's going to happen if I ever have to work at an Eclipse shop. Might have to turn it down, honestly.

There are Eclipse shops? In 2019? Why? I mean, even IntelliJ Community (which, despite the implications of the name, can be used for everything) is a fair bit better.

Any place which has internal tooling tightly coupled to Eclipse, and isn't willing to or has not gotten to develop the same for IntelliJ.

Re: JetBrains: $270M revenue, 405K paying users, $0 raised

#305

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

I agree with many of the other posters: JetBrains has succeeded because their products are generally awesome, and I am a happy personal subscriber. People should especially remember what the Java IDE landscape looked like when they first came out with IntelliJ: using IntelliJ after using NetBeans or Eclipse was like using Google for the first time after being familiar with AltaVista - it was just a night and day better product.

Still, I wonder if they could have been successful without funding if they were a US or Western European company. Especially in the early days, I'm sure the much lower salaries in Prague allowed them to be more competitive with a lower burn rate. My point is I think their VC-less success would have been much more difficult in a place with higher salaries and cost-of-living.

Re: JetBrains: $270M revenue, 405K paying users, $0 raised

#306

Post by detaro »

herova wrote: post #290
detaro wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

?

Just look at open positions count in different jetbrains offices. Main r&d place is St Petersburg Russia. Second one is Munich.

Wasn't clear what you were aiming at with your comment. (And typically, I'd read "X-based" as "has HQ in X", nothing more. Normal in this industry for companies to be widely spread)

Re: JetBrains: $270M revenue, 405K paying users, $0 raised

#307

Post by ardy42 »

newguy1234 wrote: post #238

A good example of why the status quo of VC funding companies is essentially wrong IMO. This year we have stories about startups getting massive amount of VC funding and turn into a flop (wework) and then we have this company which got $0 funding and became a success.

> A good example of why the status quo of VC funding companies is essentially wrong IMO. This year we have stories about startups getting massive amount of VC funding and turn into a flop (wework) and then we have this company which got $0 funding and became a success.

From what I understand, the VC funding model is toxic for sustainable, profitable businesses that successfully sell products in some niche. VCs either want your business to have a 0.1% chance of being the next Facebook or be something that a FAANG might want to buy out, and if your business isn't one of those things, they'll make you "pivot" and turn it into one.

JetBrains is a good example of the kind of technology companies we need more of.

Re: JetBrains: $270M revenue, 405K paying users, $0 raised

#308

Post by ScottBurson »

lol768 wrote: post #180
kevindong wrote: post #179

I'm a big fan of the way JetBrains sells their licenses. Like a lot of software companies nowadays, they only sell licenses on a subscription basis. But with a very customer-friendly clause of where if you pay for a subscription for 12 months you get a perpetual license for the latest version of the product when you initially subscribed. And then after paying for any particular version of a product for 12 months, you…

>But with a very customer-friendly clause of where if you pay for a subscription for 12 months you get a perpetual license for the latest version of the product when you initially subscribed. And then after paying for any particular version of a product for 12 months, you also get a perpetual license for that particular version and so on and so forth This came about due to a decent amount of consumer backlash, if I r…

> They used to sell standalone perpetual licenses which included a period of updates.

I'm missing something. What's the difference between that and what they're doing now? You pay $X, you get a perpetual licence and updates for a limited period.

Re: JetBrains: $270M revenue, 405K paying users, $0 raised

#309

Post by sam_lowry_ »

rsynnott wrote: post #201
closeparen wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use Jetbrains products for everything at work. I don't know what's going to happen if I ever have to work at an Eclipse shop. Might have to turn it down, honestly.

There are Eclipse shops? In 2019? Why? I mean, even IntelliJ Community (which, despite the implications of the name, can be used for everything) is a fair bit better.

Because of Eclipse RCP or EMF legacy?

Re: JetBrains: $270M revenue, 405K paying users, $0 raised

#310

Post by sam_lowry_ »

wolco wrote: post #136
masklinn wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Unlike Eclipse, which is acceptable That's a nice way of saying it's a trash fire.

Eclipse is gimp Jetbrains is photoshop.

Photoshop is much less free/open than Jetbrains products are.
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