Hacker News Reader

Comment by rob74 | Hacker News Reader

> I'm super happy JetBrains has been opening up all their editors to offer free access for non-commercial use.

All? That would be news to me! From the 10 IDEs (not counting ReSharper, which iss a plugin vor Visual Studio) listed on https://www.jetbrains.com/ides/#choose-your-ide, only CLion, Rider, RustRover and WebStorm are free for non-commercial use. Plus, each of the products has its own free or discounted licenses for certain users (e.g. students).

View on HN

"Has been opening" is the present perfect continuous tense [0], which describes something that started in the past and is still ongoing. In TFA JetBrains says explicitly that this is a process that they intend to continue assuming it goes well.

[0] https://www.grammarly.com/blog/grammar/present-perfect-conti...

I have been using PyCharm, IDEA and Android Studio for free for a while now. I'm not a student or any special category of user. I think you only get "core" features for free but they sure still among the most featureful IDEs that I have used.

I was curious about "for a while" and it is apparently 16 years (2009 commit with message "license.txt" https://github.com/Jetbrains/intellij-community/tree/4d9912f... ) and the PyCharm Apache 2 release seems to be a lot harder to actually track down but https://github.com/JetBrains/intellij-community/commit/e0d02... is cited as "initial extraction of python-community module (for now with a few cyclic dependencies)" in 2013

Well, I said "has been," as in, in-the-process!

I'm not sure why the staggered rollout, maybe there's strategic reasons certain ones will never have a free non-commercial license. But so far they've been consistently opening them up one-by-one.

It'll be interesting to see what they do for PyCharm and IntelliJ, which already have free Community Editions. Long term, I doubt they'll want to have two types of free version that restrict usage in completely different ways, but if they kill the Community Editions, anyone using them for commercial use will have to either build from source (hopefully the end of community editions wouldn't mean the end of the open source parts), start paying, or switch to an alternative.

I'm making zero predictions about what they'll do, there's a lot of ways it could go.

There are community editions of IDEA and PyCharm which are free for commercial use too.

Right, but goland, and importantly the go plugin for intellij are both not free, which is a bummer

Since the Goland plugin and then IDE arrived, they torpedoed the prior Golang plugin but it still exists and is Apache 2 https://github.com/go-lang-plugin-org/go-lang-idea-plugin/bl...

I don't recall offhand what features it does or doesn't support, and certainly not GOMODULES et al but just FYI

They did a similar "fuck you" to the Terraform plugin <https://github.com/VladRassokhin/intellij-hcl/blob/v0.6.14/L...> when they hired the developer and then made the built-in Terraform functionality basically abandonware :fu:

And then, in some extra weird behavior, they have CloudFormation still in the open <https://github.com/JetBrains/intellij-plugins/tree/idea/251....> but mysteriously it, too, is basically abandonware. Or maybe they're expecting the community to chip in and fix the bugs <https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issues?q=subsystem:%20%7BLang...>. I dunno.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com