The Jetbrains fiasco

This is sort of old news now, but I haven’t had a chance to weigh in yet so I figured I would type my thoughts up anyway. On September 3rd Jetbrains announced a new licensing model. As you can imagine people immediately went crazy on twitter and 15 years of developer goodwill went up in smoke. What is the issue with the new model, the biggest problem with it is that they are moving from a perpetual model where you own that version of the IDE to a rental model ala Adobe where if you stop paying your tools stop working. Even more infuriating they came out like this was doing a favor for their developers and making it cheaper. In reality it only really makes it cheaper if you are say a consulting shop that is often switching between say pycharm, webstorm and idea. Then you can save some money over the cost of 3 perpetual licenses. For pretty much everyone else it is much worse.