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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

#361

Post by mthoms »

kevindong wrote: post #179

I'm a big fan of the way JetBrains sells their licenses. Like a lot of software companies nowadays, they only sell licenses on a subscription basis. But with a very customer-friendly clause of where if you pay for a subscription for 12 months you get a perpetual license for the latest version of the product when you initially subscribed. And then after paying for any particular version of a product for 12 months, you…

This is incorrect. Lots of people believe this but it just isn't true.

When your one-year subscription expires you actually have a perpetual license for the first version that was available when you signed up. NOT for the last one available when the contract ended.

In other words, when your one year subscription is up, you have to downgrade to a one year-old (possibly buggy) version.

For more mature toolchains like C or Java, this seems reasonable. For ones that undergo massive updates each version (WebStorm, AppCode) it's a non-starter.

EDIT: on second read, this may have been what the parent poster was trying to say. I'm leaving this comment as-is though because there seems to be a TON of confusion about this point.

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

#362

Post by ncallaway »

zmzrr wrote: post #311
mmastrac wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This seems wrong.

It turned out that they specified GPL, and so the redistributor is violating the license.

However, if they hadn't specified a license, then the product would be unlicensed. Which would make the redistributor directly violating their copyright.

If source code doesn't come with a license, that doesn't make it fair game. That makes it unusable by any third-parties.

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

#363

Post by wlesieutre »

dangoor wrote: post #260
optimiz3 wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same here for Adobe Creative Suite; still on version 6 (perpetual license), which I run in a Virtual Machine due to support end-of-life.

FWIW, I think Adobe actually adds quite a bit to Creative Cloud every year, plus they offer fonts and connections with their mobile apps and such as part of the same price. Creative Cloud today is a very different beast from CS6. (obdisclaimer: I worked for Adobe several years ago, but have no current stake other than being on the CC photography plan)

Same boat here. I’ll concede that they do add things, but as a pretty small scale hobbyist they don’t add anything I want or need. But they expect me to pay the same full price as a pro user.

I used to buy it every couple of versions or when it went on sale, and that was good enough for my needs. No such luck anymore.

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

#365

Post by dmitryminkovsky »

thawaway1837 wrote: post #291
masklinn wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Unlike Eclipse, which is acceptable That's a nice way of saying it's a trash fire.

What happened to Eclipse? I remember there was a time when IBM really invested in it that it was miles better than anything in the Java editing space, or honestly any competitor at the time. For example, instantaneous compiling and error checking was so far ahead it took MS many years to catch up with it. It used to be a matter of huge excitement when a new language or framework was supported by Eclipse. But I moved…

Really? Is it that bad? I haven’t tried it in a long time but I imagined that if I opened it up it would be pretty good. Got to try it now.

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

#366

Post by dangoor »

wlesieutre wrote: post #363
dangoor wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW, I think Adobe actually adds quite a bit to Creative Cloud every year, plus they offer fonts and connections with their mobile apps and such as part of the same price. Creative Cloud today is a very different beast from CS6. (obdisclaimer: I worked for Adobe several years ago, but have no current stake other than being on the CC photography plan)

Same boat here. I’ll concede that they do add things, but as a pretty small scale hobbyist they don’t add anything I want or need. But they expect me to pay the same full price as a pro user. I used to buy it every couple of versions or when it went on sale, and that was good enough for my needs. No such luck anymore.

Depending on what you do use, Mac users actually have lots of great choices now. The Affinity apps, for example, are terrific.

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

#368

Post by wlesieutre »

dangoor wrote: post #366
wlesieutre wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same boat here. I’ll concede that they do add things, but as a pretty small scale hobbyist they don’t add anything I want or need. But they expect me to pay the same full price as a pro user. I used to buy it every couple of versions or when it went on sale, and that was good enough for my needs. No such luck anymore.

Depending on what you do use, Mac users actually have lots of great choices now. The Affinity apps, for example, are terrific.

I’ve got them!

Did a stint on Sketch as well. It’s now gone subscription, but it think it’s the more acceptable “still works but you stops getting updates” type subscription like jetbrains.

What I really want is an Affinity photo library manager like Lightroom. I’ve looked at some currently available options and not been impressed, but there were tweets to the effect that Affinity was thinking about it.

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

#369

Post by mthoms »

ScottBurson wrote: post #308
lol768 wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>But with a very customer-friendly clause of where if you pay for a subscription for 12 months you get a perpetual license for the latest version of the product when you initially subscribed. And then after paying for any particular version of a product for 12 months, you also get a perpetual license for that particular version and so on and so forth This came about due to a decent amount of consumer backlash, if I r…

> They used to sell standalone perpetual licenses which included a period of updates. I'm missing something. What's the difference between that and what they're doing now? You pay $X, you get a perpetual licence and updates for a limited period.

Your perpetual license is for the oldest version available during your subscription period, not the newest.

Old model: Pay $X.XX and get one year of updates.

New model: Pay $X.XX (spread over 12 months) and you can use all new versions UNTIL the subscription ends. At which point, unless you renew, you have to DOWNGRADE to the one year old version.

Let's face it, downgrading such an import tool is not something developers will be comfortable with (especially since JB products occasionally have show-stopping bugs).

Having said that, I'll admit to liking their products (and support). But the model is not as generous as everyone seems to think.

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

#370

Post by echelon »

manigandham wrote: post #345
thijsvandien wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True; that's the only subscription model I find acceptable for software that hardly changes in meaningful ways. For example, I refuse to upgrade Git Tower to version 3 as a protest against fournova's new licensing. Up to that point, I was a loyal customer and product advocate, basically buying every upgrade anyway, but by my own choice. Instead, I'll be on version 2 "forever", despite all its flaws. It was even worse…

There's also Fork: https://git-fork.com/

I'm really curious - why do people want a graphical git client? The command line exposes everything, and the model is simple and intuitive.

I work in a very large monorepo, so it's not like I'm working in a git tree that isn't complicated.

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