Hacker News Reader

Comment by Philip-J-Fry | Hacker News Reader

Thank the gods for JetBrains. I love their software.

Excellent business model, I get to keep the software I bought when the license expires. Never forced to continually pay for something you don't see value in updating. I think that's one of the key factors which drives them to continue to improve their products. If future version of their products wasn't vastly improved over the previous then people wouldn't upgrade because their current version serves them perfectly fine. And if you don't like this years update, maybe you'll like next years. No downsides whatsoever.

Never used any of their TeamCity/Spaces stuff but it looks cool. I can definitely say I'm a fan of their IDEs though. Use them every day.

View on HN

I ran (self-hosted) TeamCity at a division of Disney for years with hundreds of projects across teams with lots of complex dependencies. To this day (though I haven't kept up as much in recent years), it's far and away the most powerful CI system I've ever used. Rock solid stability, to boot. And it's only become better and better over the years.

Does that mean it's right for every job? Not at all. Sometimes you just need simple and accessible. Things like CircleCI or Travis or Heroku's CI. But not Jenkins. I put Jenkins into the same category as TeamCity, and it falls far short.

If you've outgrown some of the other options and need really powerful CI, I can't recommend TeamCity enough.

It is interesting that they initially offered subscription model without unexpirable license. But because of community backlash they changed it and people seem to be happy with the outcome.

Listen to your users.

> It is interesting that they initially offered subscription model without unexpirable license.

I wasn't even aware they ever did licenses that 'fully expire' but I'm glad they have their current model.

It went Buy_every_version_you_want -> Hard_license -> Outcry -> Current model.

Current model still isn't perfect as you only get the version that existed when your sub starts not when it ends. So if your sub expires you actually have to downgrade the product to an old version.

Before if you bought a major point release you would get all minor point releases as upgrades. Now you don't even get any bug fixes that occurred since your sub started.

I love their products though.

You'll get bugfixes (all .Z releases in X.Y.Z scheme).

Well, I think it's fair. If there was no subscription model, this would be the same as buying the version that was available at the time of your purchase. Everything that gets released after that is only a teaser that nags you to continue your subscription. You don't need to update.

Before the licensing change if you purchased a major version such as 5.0 you would get all upgrades for free until 6.0. This was the change that caused the uproar because that was no longer the case.

I feel like you are understating the backlash they faced. I came back from a vacation the day after they announced it and checked here, /r/programming, and a few other developer-focused forums including their own site and it was like the world was on fire. There were very few people who supported the change or were even indifferent. It seemed like the entire community united against it. JetBrains really didn't have a choice but to listen. And thankfully they did; their products are invaluable to us at this point.

Just out of interest, what other development-focused forums are there?

Forums in general have been dying out for a while now, unfortunately. I think this was back in August 2015 and at the time, I was an active member of some now-dead forums on the ProBoards network and I distinctly remember looking at either laravel.io or the Laracasts forums to gauge reaction.

I see. All I have left is this and the programming subreddit. The latter suffers a lot from new programmers and unrelated content (something like „I wrote my first HTML Tag today). Programming language specific subreddits suffer from a low number of subscribers. YC suffers from elite mindsets and arrogance (most notably on topics like modern javascript)

> Never used any of their TeamCity/Spaces stuff but it looks cool. I can definitely say I'm a fan of their IDEs though. Use them every day.

I looked into the cloud offerings they have, the CI system is way more powerful than what I am using (bitbucket pipelines) and I'm actually pushing the limits of what I can sanely do there, so I may actually move over soon.

I'm a big fan of teamcity - might be because it's the first CI system I used professionally, but compared to Jenkins it just works (batteries included) and compared to circleci I find the configuration much less repeatitive and UI richer in terms of reporting / feedback.

Yet to try the cloud hosted version, but it's on my list as the only downside for my personal usage is the minimum ram requirement (I try to keep my hobby projects Infrastructure as close to $0 cost / month as possible)

> Never forced to continually pay for something you don't see value in updating.

I'm glad they dialed back to this reasonable compromise. I am a big fan and was a paying subscriber (personally, in addition to a work license) when they changed licensing terms to brick the software when your yearly subscription was up. There was a predictable outrage, but they fortunately listened and changed to the present arrangement.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com