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Rider is now free for non-commercial use

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Re: Rider is now free for non-commercial use

#111
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> who are some of the most difficult buyers to convenience to pay 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.

There's a long history of the likes of Redis, MongoDB, Grafana, Terraform etc first releasing their product as free and open source to get adoption, hoping to make money by some indirect means, then relicensing to closed source later on because nobody pays for something they can get for free. And pretty much all major programming languages and libraries are given away for free too. Someone tries to introduce BitKeepe…

This is where remembering the free-costless and free-libre distinction is important. Linux is free-libre, so it's natural that it insists on its dependencies being free-libre.

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.

Re: Rider is now free for non-commercial use

#112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This company has always impressed me from the get-go. I started my journey with IntelliJ, and it was the best IDE I ever put my hands on. And ever since then, I kept using their other IDEs as well. 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 w…

I suspect that JetBrains is trying to respond to the fact that Microsoft gives VSCode away for free and that's likely what is spurring the massive adoption of VSCode. 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 prefer VSCode not mainly directly because it is free, but because a side effect of it being free is that it has support in its exosystem (often, but not always, also free) for everything I want to do, usually well before commercial IDEs. There are some things some commercial IDEs do better for some of the things I do... but none of them have the breadth of functionality in the VSCode ecosystem, and there is value to not switching IDEs for different tasks. And there are plenty of things where the best tool I’ve found is in the VSCode ecosystem, not a commercial IDE.

Re: Rider is now free for non-commercial use

#113

As a paying subscriber I love this move for the .NET community. As a .NET dev for many years, I've noticed there have been periods of time where either Visual Studio or Rider was far better than the other. Currently, Rider is much better. Hopefully this encourages more people to try out C# & F#. Both fantastic languages. - Edit - Looks like Webstorm (JS/TS editor) is also free now.

both webstorm and rider is free now? why am I still paying. been a customer for years but all I used was rider and webstorm.

Re: Rider is now free for non-commercial use

#114

There are a few privately owned companies that amaze me: JetBrains, Valve among the top. Somehow they have a much better value/user and make reasonable decisions: counter intuitive to investors/shareholders but insanely intuitive to their users. I am sure the public market has made the general public reap the rewards of large companies (kudos!) but some of the privately owned companies are absolutely kicking ass to s…

I'm not too surprised. I hope they stay privately owned! It's a lot easier to focus on "make good product" when you don't have investors/accountants/management/etc badgering you about "stock price needs to go up, make something shiny and get it out this month".

I left my last company (pretty large, ~1500 employees at the time IIRC) for a variety of reasons, but that was the primary driver. I'd joined on when they were privately owned by the guy who founded it. Then they got some private equity investment group to buy out part of the company. Then they did an IPO. Everyone was SUPER excited about the IPO. I didn't pay too much attention, I was focused on the product my team was building. ESOP was nice. But within a year we were being pushed hard to cut corners and get a half-baked version of the product out to market instead of building it to do the job well like we'd planned from day 1. Ironically, if we hadn't been constantly badgered and having our priorities flipped back and forth, I bet we would have had a useful, functional version of the initial plan out the door by the time I left, with the proper foundation to keep building and expanding it to solve the problems our customers were experiencing with the old system. But now the old system's problems are deeply embedded in the new system, because it was quicker to shove out the door that way.

On the contrary, the place I'm at now is a much smaller company, and the founder/CEO has stated in no uncertain terms that we'll never be sold out to investors because it would mean that we'd be beholden to interests contrary to building the product our customers want and running the company in a long-term sustainable manner.

Re: Rider is now free for non-commercial use

#115
post #6

What an amazing accomplishment JetBrains has done. 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). https://www.jetbrains.com/lp/annualreport-2023/

They are a russian company. Russians despite their evil empire are smart and capable people.

they aren't a russian company. they were founded in the czech republic... they may have been a country that was aligned ideologically with the ussr during the cold war but that's not the same as being russian.

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.

Re: Rider is now free for non-commercial use

#116

This is pretty huge all around, especially with Microsoft discontinuing Visual Studio for Mac. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/releases/2022... I'd also like to note the great integration Rider has with Godot and Unity for game development.

Don't forget Unreal as well - I've used Rider on multiple AAA Unreal titles that include custom engine edits and it is significantly faster than VS at loading massive projects. The integration is great and allows for seeing blueprint classes and references in the C++ project.

I say this as a big user of JetBrains - I have had SOME issues with their intellisense dropping some references in Rider when there are a lot of references, so I would occasionally switch to VS when there were a lot of references to search through, but other than extreme cases Rider is just so much more pleasant to use.

Re: Rider is now free for non-commercial use

#117

This is pretty huge all around, especially with Microsoft discontinuing Visual Studio for Mac. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/releases/2022... I'd also like to note the great integration Rider has with Godot and Unity for game development.

What does "noncommercial use" mean in this context though? These are tools for work - is the idea that students can use them for free and then will start paying once they finish school?

Re: Rider is now free for non-commercial use

#118

As a paying subscriber I love this move for the .NET community. As a .NET dev for many years, I've noticed there have been periods of time where either Visual Studio or Rider was far better than the other. Currently, Rider is much better. Hopefully this encourages more people to try out C# & F#. Both fantastic languages. - Edit - Looks like Webstorm (JS/TS editor) is also free now.

both webstorm and rider is free now? why am I still paying. been a customer for years but all I used was rider and webstorm.

free for non-commercial use.

Re: Rider is now free for non-commercial use

#119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are a russian company. Russians despite their evil empire are smart and capable people.

they aren't a russian company. they were founded in the czech republic... they may have been a country that was aligned ideologically with the ussr during the cold war but that's not the same as being russian. 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…

The company is not czech. Russians are an overwhelming majority of the employees.

Re: Rider is now free for non-commercial use

#120

Sounds like they got a big present from Microsoft.

No, they're feeling pressure from VSCode (which is primitive in comparison, but good enough for most people). Thus the new theme (which none of the old users asked for) — total clone of VSCode UI, and this announcement. It's the opposite of what you're thinking.

Not sure which version of VSCode you think the new UI is a clone of, but I don't really see it. The tool buttons? VS has always had those, thought they had text by default. Tabs? VS has those too. Bottom bar? VS also. In fact, Rider looks like all the other Jetbrains IDEs - except Fleet, which is actually their VS Code competitor.
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