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RubyMine is now free for non-commercial use

blog.jetbrains.com

1–10 of 83 posts

Re: RubyMine is now free for non-commercial use

#2
>Free for non commercial use

I like to recreationally overthink sometimes:

Most of us code in hopes that the thing we make is cool and useful, and it's a good thing if the thing we make catches on and becomes popular. Some might even say if they could make a living off their creation, they'd love that.

Given that this site is what it is, -most- of us have financial ambitions, with code as the means to an end to get us that money.

Back to the free for non commercial use stipulation, I'm just wondering how practical is this model? Is it expected that people do periodic reviews of the success of their projects and make some sort of subjective judgement when they should pay for a license?

Is there room for some other business model to more viably compete with vscode and vscode-forks that are free, while still creating paychecks for JetBrains?

Re: RubyMine is now free for non-commercial use

#4
I'd like to see a comparison of IDE market share over the past decade or so. My assumption is that VS Code has gained market share exponentially, eating at both Visual Studio's and JetBrains' share significantly, leading JetBrains to start offering their products for free personal use to try to recoup some of that lost user base.

I could be wrong, but that's my observation based on the extreme popularity of VS Code and the abundance of extensions for virtually every language and framework out there.

Re: RubyMine is now free for non-commercial use

#5
post #3

Just another indication that ruby is dead?

I am not sure how this contributes to the unfounded idea that ruby is dead—Shopify, Stripe, and GitHub amongst many others would like a word.

RubyMine isn’t the editor of choice for many of my fellow rubyists, but it is for me—IntelliJ’s LSP alone is a godsend when you’re diving deep into debugging weird gems. I have tried ruby-lsp from Shopify and it gets 95% there but that last 5% is what makes me hyper-productive.

Most of the community is on VS Code. We did have a weird, loud Danish guy using TextMate until recently, but I guess he switched to neovim.

Having said, RubyMine was very popular when ruby was on HN as much as AI is today. It hasn’t kept up, just like Sublime has been largely replaced by VS Code.

Re: RubyMine is now free for non-commercial use

#6

>Free for non commercial use I like to recreationally overthink sometimes: Most of us code in hopes that the thing we make is cool and useful, and it's a good thing if the thing we make catches on and becomes popular. Some might even say if they could make a living off their creation, they'd love that. Given that this site is what it is, -most- of us have financial ambitions, with code as the means to an end to get u…

I treat the spirit of these licenses as: "if you have reasonable expectation of making money from your use of it, please buy a license. Otherwise, we appreciate the mindshare."

Practically speaking, the license is probably much closer to "if you are making prodigious amounts of money, and you are using our software, then you had better buy a license to avoid a legal situation."

Re: RubyMine is now free for non-commercial use

#7
It's been a long time since I last used RubyMine, but I always felt that it was the weakest of the JetBrains tools. And not because JetBrains didn't try hard enough, but because Ruby just doesn't offer a lot of opportunities for an IDE to take advantage of.

I ended up cancelling my subscription over some trivial thing (I think it was the fact that I couldn't quite get the IDE to preserve the indentation of a file. It was an all-or-nothing global setting, but I work on codebases that might have a 4-space indent HTML file and a 2-space indent HTML File in the same directory, and the IDE was ignoring the current style of the file and using whatever indent level I had configured).

Re: RubyMine is now free for non-commercial use

#8
This is awesome. Over the past four years I went from Sublime Text, to VS Code, to a 'dual IDE' setup (neovim and cursor).

I hear rubymine has the best support for documentation and source code lookup capabilities (vitally important).

Curious of its AI capabilities; how much of a step down would it be going from cursor to rubymine? I guess it could be used stand-alone purely for its documentation/source capabilities, but 3 IDEs feels like overkill.

Re: RubyMine is now free for non-commercial use

#10

>Free for non commercial use I like to recreationally overthink sometimes: Most of us code in hopes that the thing we make is cool and useful, and it's a good thing if the thing we make catches on and becomes popular. Some might even say if they could make a living off their creation, they'd love that. Given that this site is what it is, -most- of us have financial ambitions, with code as the means to an end to get u…

I treat the spirit of these licenses as: "if you have reasonable expectation of making money from your use of it, please buy a license. Otherwise, we appreciate the mindshare." Practically speaking, the license is probably much closer to "if you are making prodigious amounts of money, and you are using our software, then you had better buy a license to avoid a legal situation."

So any VC funded startup should use for free in your opinion?
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