> In the jetbrains you only get a perpetual license for the current version. You lose the year of updates.
False unless they changed it recently. It explicitly read last version on the subscription. I actually bought one a few years back and I got fallback to the last version of the subscription timeframe.
Regarding the “why”, it’s simply the option that properly aligns interests. A long enough subscription (ie an year), should cover initial expenses and development during the period, if the company wants to keep a customer paying, it needs to keep making the software better.
It’s putting customer first, which is something companies tend to forget which tend to lead to a downfall if they have not secured a strong prison/moat for their rent seeking behaviors.
Companies with proper alignment on incentives tend to make/maintain/develop better products over a larger timeframe. But ofc that was meaningless when money was “cheap” (negative interest rates), so VCs could just dump a huge amount of money on creating some competitor out of nowhere, put it out for free, operate under losses, and once they have “captured” a big enough userbase and fcked the rest of the competition, and have decent lock in, start the shitification of service for revenue, to make up for all the “investment”, leaving customers with no proper alternative.
A perpetual fallback license is showing customer that you care. And it’s also putting a gun on yourself to keep improving the product instead of stagnating for “captured” revenue.
Also, happy customers tend to give free publicity, look here at hackernews how their tools are mostly praised.
Edit: it seems that indeed they changed the version to the initial plus bugfixes, or 12months old if using consecutive monthly billing