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Rider is now free for non-commercial use

jetbrains.com

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Re: Rider is now free for non-commercial use

#91

Post by sudhirj »

recursive wrote: post #75
arkh wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most professional developers in Western countries should have the means to pay for their own license if really needed.

My employer has a policy forbidding the use of software that I personally paid for. Free software is fine for some reason.

This is usually because the software you pay for yourself has licensing terms that don’t allow commercial use or reimbursement. See the JetBrains personal license terms itself. Understandably, the company will find it easier and cheaper to forbid use than hire a lawyer to check each license for each software that each employee wants to use.

Re: Rider is now free for non-commercial use

#92

Post by memsom »

Nullabillity wrote: post #50
sofixa wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> who are some of the most difficult buyers to convenience to pay And who more often than not get their software imposed on by the orgs they work in, so it's doubly complicated - the developers have to be convinced themselves enough to be willing to convince their IT department/fellow developers to pay for.

This seems to be what JetBrains has been betting on for a long time. Don't need to build a competent text editor if you can give management the right buzzwords.

I have access to both an MSDN subscription paid through my employer and Rider that I pay for myself. I use Rider over VS2022. Why? VS2022 is slower and way more flaky with Android development. Rider has Resharper built in. I like that I can use 1 IDE vendor's products for everything I need (Pycharm, IntelliJ, Rider, RustRover and Android Studio.)

Re: Rider is now free for non-commercial use

#93

Post by mathverse »

alberth wrote: 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.

Re: Rider is now free for non-commercial use

#94

Post by aniviacat »

recursive wrote: post #75
arkh wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most professional developers in Western countries should have the means to pay for their own license if really needed.

My employer has a policy forbidding the use of software that I personally paid for. Free software is fine for some reason.

If your employer allows you to pay for development software, they can get into legal issues.

Companies (depending on jurisdiction) are not allowed to make employees pay for items necessary for work.

And allowing employees to pay can easily be misinterpreted into subtly pressuring employees to pay.

Re: Rider is now free for non-commercial use

#95

Post by dragonwriter »

jen20 wrote: post #51
arkh wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most professional developers in Western countries should have the means to pay for their own license if really needed.

That doesn’t make it permissible to run the software on company equipment, necessarily.

Yeah, specifically it will frequently (1) violate employer policy to use it on emoloyer equipment if not approved and, providing licensing is required, licensed by the employer, and (2) violate the license of the software to use it when it is not licensed to the employer.

Re: Rider is now free for non-commercial use

#96

Post by mike_hearn »

qsort wrote: post #17
alberth wrote: 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/

> 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.

It's hard because developers don't usually have spending authority or budget. Often, nor does their manager or their manager's manager. To get the company to buy something you have to escalate to an absurdly high place in the org chart and so devs will often try to cobble something together out of free stuff, even if it's far less efficient, because spending developer time doesn't require permission whereas spending credit card balance does.

Unrelatedly, there's also to some extent an expectation that everything is free, even for commercial users. The most common pricing question I get about my product is "can't you make it free for commercial projects that don't have revenue yet", i.e. effectively asking me to become investors in their own venture. Because often they want to make a product company, but not spend any money to do so.

Source: I run a small software company that sells to developers.

Re: Rider is now free for non-commercial use

#97

Post by gspencley »

princevegeta89 wrote: post #55
alberth wrote: 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/

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 use all the time and couldn't live without) that I just take for granted. And when I watch other devs do things the hard way in VSCode I wonder why it's is so popular. I think most devs just either don't know what they are missing, or it just comes down to cost.

I also often chuckle when people say "Oh there's a VSCode plugin that can do that." I'm not certain, but I don't think I've ever installed a single plugin in IntelliJ because it just does everything I need out of the box.

Re: Rider is now free for non-commercial use

#98

Post by mnau »

izacus wrote: post #38
ozim wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given amount of open source available for free I can easily say your statement is totally wrong.

Huge majority of OSS developers (especially for big projects) are paid for their opensource work too.

The 2024 Tidelift state of the open source maintainer report (https://explore.tidelift.com/2024-survey) disagrees. And that is probably the most comprehensive one that actually favors large projects, because of Tidelift business model.

> The portion of respondents who reported they are unpaid hobbyists remains at 60 percent, the same as in last year's survey.

Only 12% checked "I'm a semi-professional maintainer, and earn most of my income from maintaining projects." 24% checked "some of my income from maintaining projects"

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