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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

#311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-...

So this is the usual "I'm peeved that I chose the wrong licence and someone made money off my project". Aha.

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

#312
post #65
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I generally prefer JetBrains' IDEs over vscode. However, vscode's remote editing capabilities just tipped the scale for me. Not too long ago I bought a "powerful" laptop (expensive!). It still chocked frequently when running multiple vm's, docker machines and/or multiple "auto-compile watchers". Then I tried vscode remote editing. I just run the browser & vscode in the laptop, and everything else on the desktop. It m…

https://www.gnu.org/software/tramp/#Overview

What's the point of, in a vscode vs jetbrains comparison, dropping a "oh, oh, Emacs can do it too!" comment?

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

#314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-...

GPL is GPL. If their thing isn't, they are in violation. They now have deep pockets.

For anything that had no license spelled out, they had and have no license to use it at all.

To be clear: they appear to have no license to distribute your code today, and owe you damages for all the distribution they have done thus far that was not licensed.

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

#315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sucks. Are you just looking for an apology?

Given that it's 15 years later, I'm sure that would be fine. It was really just disappointing for a me in his mid-20s.

No. Contempt should be accountable.

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

#317
post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No apologies, no compensation for building a commercial product on something I had spent a decent amount of time on. I think the important question here is did they do this in violation of the open source license you had adopted as at the time the alleged infraction took place?

Something can be legal and still be incredibly tasteless. If you keep lifting major open source tooling as the basis of your product without contributing, you're eventually going to exhaust the patience and free time of the people working on it. Think about it this way: When Linus started working on Linux and decided to release it under the GPL, was it because he wanted companies to use it as the basis of billion-dol…

If you think doing so is tasteless, you are clearly approaching this with a social lens and I don’t necessarily disagree with your conclusions.

I chose to approach this with an economic lens, hence the question of whether the original license was permissive, which is the green-light that allows all commercial exploitations to not appear illegal in the eyes of the law.

Open source is one of those activities where developers, who are no less human than non-developers, interleave social norms with market norms.

As far as humans go, social & market/economic norms don’t mix very well [0], so an unfortunate side effect of a lot of open source projects is that our expectations as humans get routinely violated due to the unnatural mix, as your example of the open source NTP developer in near penury clearly illustrates.

[0] https://www.aglobalreach.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/Soci...

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

#318
post #149

Their company philosophy is "everybody codes", which results in much less management (and possibly more freedom for the employee :). They have an office in Munich.

People will still manage in such situations. It will be adhoc and depending on social evolution rather then a formal structure.

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

#319
post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Usually the products are nothing more than a collection of IntelliJ Ultimate plugins That's not really true. The experience you get from, e.g. PyCharm and GoLand is substantially better than what you get from IDEA + Python plugin or IDEA + Go plugin. Yes, the plugin will get you 85% of the way there, but it will feel more clumsy and hacky than just using the dedicated product.

That’s absolutely wrong. The only thing that you’ll notice in IDEA is that it makes certain assumptions about Java (e.g vocabulary and certain menu items are Java-related), but otherwise the functionality is the same.

The language specific apps also seem to get updated before the language plugins do.

I used to use IntelliJ Ultimate, and had to wait a while before getting new features announced for PhpStorm, for example.

I now just use PhpStorm for PHP and GoLand for Go, instead of attempting to use IntelliJ for all languages. I spend less time configuring IntelliJ for each language and get updates on release day.

JetBrains has an "everything" licence that I was able to migrate to from IntelliJ Ultimate.

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

#320
post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eclipse is gimp Jetbrains is photoshop.

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

You may like them more for a variety of reasons but how is photoshop less free/open than Jetbrains products. Both are commericial products that require a licease and both are on the subscription model after selling unlimited liceases for years.
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