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Comment by mikeash | Hacker News Reader

I pay for Spotify. I don't like JetBrains' decision.

Walk me through why this removes my right to complain. I don't get it.

I don't like JetBrains' decision because using their software represents a large investment in time and effort to learn it and get set up to use it. That investment could then be destroyed at any time if they go out of business, or if they decide in a few years that their prices need to be 500x higher. This is important to me because building software is how I eat.

Spotify is click and go. It's just music, and there are about a thousand other services where I can get music if Spotify goes kablooie. Worst case I have no more streaming music, and I can continue to eat even if that happens.

So do explain, how does paying for the latter mean I can't complain about the former?

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1. If they "go out of business" you will save money with the new model, because instead of paying for a year of the license in advance, you are paying by month.

2. Nothing in their old model prevented them from raising prices. Not sure how you think switching to a monthly subscription model changes that.

i.e. your entire premise, that this is an investment of time and money, really has nothing to do with JetBrains' switch to a subscription model. In fact, they would probably be more likely to go out of business if they stuck with the old model, so this protects your investment.

Complaining because you don't think you can afford it is an understandable position. Your points, however, are entirely irrelevant.

I think you're missing the fact that with the old model your purchase keeps working forever, you just don't get updates. With the new model, your purchase stops working when the subscription runs out.

If they went out of business or raised prices in the old model, I could keep using the version I purchased for as long as I wanted. With the new model, my software turns into a pumpkin and my choice is either to keep paying whatever they want to charge, or switch to something else.

You can use the open source community edition of many of their products forever...

If that's the solution then I guess I might as well get started with it now.

Edit: oh, exactly one of their products has a Community Edition. Guess that's not much of an option after all, unless that's the one product you need.

It's definitely not all their products, but it's definitely higher than one too - PyCharm and IntelliJ both have Community Editions.

You're right. I was going off their "all products" list:

https://www.jetbrains.com/products.html?fromMenu

I guess it's not "all" products.

> 1. If they "go out of business" you will save money with the new model, because instead of paying for a year of the license in advance, you are paying by month.

Oh, it's much worse than that. With the old licensing model, if JetBrains went out of business, you'd be left with an antiquated IDE that works. Under the new model, you'd be left with nothing because the IDEs need to call-home and verify against a licensing server. Who knows what happens when the licensing server gets decommissioned (I guess you could ask EA customers).

If they actually went out of business, I'm sure they'd to something to remedy the situation.

But what? We'd all like them to push out one last update that makes everything free, and I'm sure the odds of that are decent. It's not guaranteed, though. What if the assets get bought up by somebody who wants a quick turnaround on his money, and sees jacking up the subscription rates as the key to success?

I like JetBrains & am a fan of their products (I'm a paying customer). I'm sure they are good people with good intentions. However, I'd rather not have this unnecessary complication - it wasn't broken before.

> If they actually went out of business, I'm sure they'd to something to remedy the situation.

That all depends on how they go out of business. They could too busy fighting other fires to write a patch that removes license-check, or it could be a hostile takeover with the subsequent "we are discontinuing $PRODUCT from next month" announcement

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