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Rider is now free for non-commercial use

jetbrains.com

191–200 of 435 posts

Re: Rider is now free for non-commercial use

#191

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 Rider add to the Godot dev experience? (I'm not familiar with either ecosystem, but I thought I recall Godot having an IDE when I last booted it up to play with it).

Re: Rider is now free for non-commercial use

#192
Regarding free non-commercial use in Jetbrains you need to accept that you'll get checked (not specified how, but I guess they will scrape your HDD? Or what?

  It’s also important to note that if you’re using a non-commercial license, you cannot opt out of the collection of anonymous usage statistics. This is similar to our Early Access Program (where statistics is opt-out) and in compliance with our Privacy Policy

Re: Rider is now free for non-commercial use

#193

Rider has a lot going for it, but I really can't stand the structure of JetBrains subscription. Why can't they just have a single monthly or annual price, rather than this absurd structure where the price gets cheaper over time, encouraging lock-in?

All Products Pack (12 IDEs, 3 extensions, 2 profilers) first year - $289.00 (+$116) second year - $231.00 (+$58) third year onwards - $173.00 you're locked in because of an extra $116 the first year and $58 the second year? https://www.jetbrains.com/store/?section=personal&billing=ye...

They may mean that they're locked into continuing the subscription to keep getting updates because if you have a break then you start at the high price again.

Whenever you don't renew you get whatever version was out when you last renewed in perpetuity which is great. But if you decide you don't want it this year, but in two years you do, now you're back at the $289 price. Though if you pay $289 every other year you're still coming out ahead compared to an annual subscription so I don't know what the issue is.

Re: Rider is now free for non-commercial use

#195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I go pretty heavy on Jetbrains products, but they have stirred up the dev community a few times chasing things seen as investor friendly. In particular when they shoved their AI plugin as a required plugin with carried an obnoxious upsell nag. In general they've also spread themselves out across a ridiculous number of products where I'd prefer if they just focused on making their current stuff work (and not discontin…

They also pulled the plug on free support for their Rust plugin which really upset me. Jetbrains is intent on making you pay before you get IDE functionality; I'd rather use VS Code or Zed these days.

They have always done that when they make a specific IDE for a language.

Re: Rider is now free for non-commercial use

#196

Rider has a lot going for it, but I really can't stand the structure of JetBrains subscription. Why can't they just have a single monthly or annual price, rather than this absurd structure where the price gets cheaper over time, encouraging lock-in?

They're rewarding recurring customers, this is not a vendor lock-in.

Re: Rider is now free for non-commercial use

#197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

It means you can use them as a hobbiest or a student. For example, you can now use Rider as the IDE on an Open Source project. If you are writing code that you are going to be paid for, you are supposed to pay. Of course, they know a lot of small devs will use it that should not. But few of them would have paid anyway and this creates a much greater pool of buyers when those devs get jobs or achieve commercial succes…

> For example, you can now use Rider as the IDE on an Open Source project

It's worth noting that even before this change, you can get the entire JB suite for free if you regularly contribute to a qualifying OSS project https://www.jetbrains.com/community/opensource/.

Re: Rider is now free for non-commercial use

#198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's what I've opted for as well, and I have to say I prefer it. gdscript is a nice language for high level game scripting, and on the couple occasions I needed to bring in some high-performance code I found it super easy to build a gdextension in Rust.

Forget gdextension imo Compile the engine from source and add your classes as a module. Cuts out all the gdextension glue code and then you don't need to ship a shared library.

Wouldn't this make engine version upgrades a nightmare?

Re: Rider is now free for non-commercial use

#199

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.

VS for Mac was junk. Better off trashing it and pushing people the VS Code route. I use VS Code daily for .NET development. It's probably 70% of what VS on Windows is, but it works well and I don't need to run a VM for it (if I need some of the in-depth tracing and profiling stuff, I can still fire up the gold standard). VS on Mac was maybe 30%

> VS for Mac was junk. Better off trashing it and pushing people the VS Code route.

Sure but VS Code for C# is trash as well. All those years, both Microsoft products, and this the experience is subpar, especially in comparison to the real Visual Studio.

Re: Rider is now free for non-commercial use

#200

Rider is much better and faster than Visual Studio, and it's worth every penny. Making it free is a great move.

I think it’s a bit worrisome that Microsoft can give away VS Code for free because they subsidize it in other ways, but JetBrains - a small software shop - clearly is being forced into this position. Just more Big Tech setting the terms for all of us trying to make a living.

While I don't disagree with your overall point, it seems worth pointing out that JetBrains has over 2,000 employees, so it's only small in comparison with industry giants, and that Rider has been successfully competing with "free" from day one: both VSCode and Visual Studio have been free for non-commercial and commercial use by individuals and small organizations for longer than Rider has existed as a product.

And Rider was built on IntelliJ and ReSharper, two products that successfully "competed with free" for many years before then.

So, if anything, I'd say that JetBrains is at worst reasonably well-positioned to survive dumping by larger competitors with more diverse product lines.

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