430 points & 495 comments (many not very nice)
Now everyone is quiet? How about some love here. This is awesome. MS is going with an "All your data is belonging to us" model; we all complain; nothing changes. Out of the blue, Google shuts down another service; we all complain; nothing changes.
JetBrains, good on you. Way more than you had to do, and did it with class. Three cheers for JetBrains!
Actually, that's not even completely accurate - it's more like praising a car salesman for not charging you that extra $2,000 that you caught him tacking on.
People should be praising themselves for complaining so loudly that they affected a positive change.
I am not sure what you mean by "doing the thing they should have done in the first place", What was the thing "they should have done"?
They did their own market analysis, they did what they thought was right at the time, their userbase disagreed, they incorporated feedback and adjusted.
This is exactly what I want companies I support to do.
If you are mad at them for not reading your mind as to how you want them to run their business, that seems a bit silly.
That's completely different from only being able to rent the product. But either way, there's still nothing praise-worthy here.
As for Google shutting down a service: that's probably because it was a free service and wasn't making them any money. Was it stupid to shut it down instead of charging for it? Probably. But Google makes stupid business decisions pretty regularly, and they have the right to do so.
In this case, the majority of people crying out were JetBrains customers. This isn't impressive, it's just baseline common sense.
I didn't have a problem with the way they were pricing before. It matched nearly every other service I use, and it would have cost less (I guess webstorm cost a whole $20 more a year!). I just assumed that all of the people who were complaining before were the standard "Let's complain about things on the internet" people.
Hence why they aren't showing up here to celebrate... they didn't actually care. Every dev I know IRL that uses JB software didn't care. 90% of them have it purchased for them by their company. I'm one of those who owns his own license, and I still don't care.
In a place that is so startup-centric, I can't believe that there is so much pushback against startup-like pricing.
In the other threads I'd have worried about being down-voted, but those individuals are likely busy creating controversy in some other thread.
That would only makes sense if JetBrains were a startup. No one likes startup-like pricing for the sake of it- even on HN. Do you want 'startup-like pricing' for your car? I for one didn't like the pricing regime because it was retrogressive and changed what I understood to be a purchase into a short-notice rental.
It's cool they listened and changed it I guess, but the subscription hate thing is ridiculous. Maybe some of these developers should step back and look at their own companies offerings before they start screaming... almost all of us are working on subscription software.
JetBrains lost my trust, and I'm going to keep an eye on competitors.
As Mr. Stallman would say, proprietary software is for suckers. You guys using it are volunteering for such abuse. Nevermind the sweet promises. It will happen again. It always does.