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).
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 when I really work on projects that make money, I don't mind paying $100 a year anyway.
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.
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.
I respect your opinion and what you said makes sense.
That said, I find myself only ever using VSCode for "light" edits since it is somewhat faster to open and close from the terminal.
>> 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.
This is exactly the reason. When people use both VSCode and Jetbrains IDEs, a huge portion of them will end up becoming a Jetbrains user, and on someday, some of them can become paying customers
VSCode infrastructure is pretty broad and the community is pretty large. I only use it to make light code edits here and there but I would never put my whole project in it.
>>I've ever installed a single plugin in IntelliJ because it just does everything I need out of the box.
Same here, the only plugins I installed were themes :)
> 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 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.
It's not about having the means, it's about most companies having policies and processes structured around common software used by all employees in a similar position to allow for collaboration, and to ensure compliance with whatever governance and licenses apply. You don't see orgs where some devs can choose GitHub, others GitLab. IDEs are more interchangeable, of course, but each developer having to set up their own config from scratch (correct plugins, build config, testing framework, etc.) would be a colossal waste of time for no reason.
Some bigger orgs allow flexibility (devs can pick Mac or Linux-based laptops, VS Code or JetBrains as the IDE, etc.), but not bring your own with your own license.
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.
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.
Since it's a tool for writing code and not prose, it does not have to be a competent text editor if it's a competent "AST editor", which it very much is. Much more so than any alternative, commercial or otherwise.
Are you implying that JetBrains ides are not competent?
Compared to their alternatives like Eclipse, Visual Studio etc I think they're a huge step up. If you're a fan of simpler tools like vim, emacs or vscode etc I can see that they may not be to your taste, but I think their products are great. They're easy to get started with, powerful when you learn to use them, relatively bug free and I'd say they significantly boost my productivity.
I don't really know anything about it. In my mind it's similar to vim or vscode, a text editor where you can add lots of functionality but without the customization it probably doesn't do that much useful stuff for you.
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.)
I dislike this implication that developers are greedy when the real tension is commercial interests vs mutually beneficial communal interests. Of course everyone expects to get paid, but developers love community projects and protect them fiercely because there's no natural force that can. It's all up to the people themselves.
Sure, some minority of people are just greedy and rude. I think most people aren't. As far as being stingy goes, I believe I have paid more for software so far than most people will in their entire life time by probably multiples and I'm happy to continue to do so, and I will also be on every thread about a CLA rug-pull as well, because BS is BS, no two ways about it.
They are two things but they are not vastly unrelated. In this context the rudeness would mostly come from entitlement which is definitely related to (and still distinct from) being "greedy".
As far as "most people are greedy" goes, that really comes down to how you quantify "greed" and I really think we're better off agreeing to disagree on this point.
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"
The site keeps shoving a data colleciton popup in my face so I can't read it - what's the sample/methodology for a "maintainer" here? Do they normalize against the usage of their output projects at all?
Are those projects the size of Jetbrains IDEs - e.g. Linux kernel, ffmpeg, VIM, Emacs, etc. ?
I don't think so. If you're saying that in big projects (e.g. Linux) most developers are paid, sure, but those projects are a drop in the ocean of open source projects. I doubt very much that there are more paid than unpaid OSS developers but neither of us are bringing numbers.
Doing charity work does not mean you don't expect to be paid for your regular work. Also, a lot of companies do pay devs to work on open source projects.
Open source isn't charity - just like playing non-professional sports isn't charity: the vast majority of participants see it as a hobby or social activity. A minority get paid, and a minority of the minority "break even", but vast majority are playing in self-organized leagues and pick up games, which are in no shape or form charities (even if the public can watch for free as a side-effect).
That is exactly the point, those using the free tools expect to be paid, while feeling entitled about those free tools capabilities and zero monetary contributions.
Thankfully, most developers aren't like the vocal minority on certain sites (cough) that allege they could write something in a weekend and thus they shouldn't pay for it.
I'd love to pay for a lot of software and dev stuff. Convincing my job to do so is such a pain that I don't even try. I do pay for WebStorm and DataGrip myself though.
Sadly developers don't have buying power. Microsoft is good example of company which understands it and lobbies its presence through channels that do make those cross company decisions.
I just pay for a license myself for both work and personal use [0].
I personally have enough buying power to afford it, and it's more than paid for itself over the years by giving me a leg up over coworkers who try to make do with free tools. People I work with think I have some superhuman ability to navigate, understand, and modify huge codebases and don't believe me when I tell them that it's just because I learned how to use JetBrains IDEs fluently.
Does your workplace explicitly allow you to use personal software on work equipment, or do you just not mention it and hope nobody notices? Just curious, as not all places would allow this.
This is not common, at least from my experience (in western companies). Even if devs have root (not a given), the policy is generally that employees cannot use paid software that the company hasn’t licensed
> 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 BitKeeper, a commercial version control system, for the Linux kernel? They won't stand for it, some's gotta clone it and give the clone away for free.
Hell, I've heard loads of people here on HN complaining when a SaaS company introduces features exclusively useful to large corporations - like single-sign-on integration - then wants to get paid for them.
There's a handful of exceptions. For example game developers will pay $$$ for "Unity" and store their assets in "Perforce" and suchlike. And I believe it's possible to pay for Visual Studio.
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.
Every single time someone posts about some commercial tool, in a website dedicated initially to startups, there is always a set of replies with half-baked open source alternatives to use instead.
Developers regularly underestimate the work required to build something and will spend a lot of time building something themselves vs buying someone else's tool for $5 / month.
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.
No, non developers are more likely to buy software for what they need for their profession (that is why tons of terrible software exists everywhere for such tasks). Ad ridden spyware is mostly for consumption things like games and random websites. On HN every now and then you will see people saying you can do anything with nano and vim/emacs and only recently some of them have started using LSP. Anything that is not totally free and open source gets 100 denials on HN.
This isn’t a rebuttal, just my complementary $0.02 on top.
It’s more complicated than “developers are cheap”. They understand software complexity, and when paying is justified. They know what a clear online grift looks like. They have and make free software. I’m happy to pay the JetBrains subscription because it’s actually good enough to warrant the price. You can’t trick a carpenter into buying a poorly build and/or overpriced cabinet by putting a fancy handle on it.
Now they are european. They started as fully Russian company. But they are a truly rare example of a company that actually left russian market. Unlike Apple or LG.
Before 2022, their de-facto headquarters and most of their employees were still located in St. Petersburg, even though the main company was registered in Prague.
> Now they are european. They started as fully Russian company.
The heavily populated parts of Russia, including the part where JetBrains was operating, are in Europe. (Russia’s not part of the EU, obviously, but “European” and “EU” don’t mean the same thing.)
Many tech companies that had large dev teams in Russia have mostly relocated them. Acronis is another example of a company that was originally entirely Russian that is out of the market completely, and from what I heard, well over 90% of the devs relocated.
It will be very interesting to see the effects of that brain drain long term.
Yeah, it sucks that Putin decided to invade a sovereign nation that was home to a bunch of JetBrains employees.
His war has turned the world upside down in a lot of ways, and I really do feel for the Russians and Ukrainians who he's dragged down with him. I have coworkers who regularly have to take shelter from his bombing campaigns.
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.
A country that was aligned ideologically with USSR is an understatement. They were under occupation as a satellite state. Those people did not sign up for communism in 1945 willingly.
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/