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Comment by sschueller | Hacker News Reader

That's nice, but https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45440117 (also from today) isn't very nice.

I find our community's take on paying for IDEs interesting. We're now willing to pay 20, 100, 200 USD a month for AI subscriptions, but wince at paying that for IDEs that clearly add value and also save time. I'm also frugal, but Jetbrain IDEs have been easily one of the best investments I've made for dev tools.

Agreed. We used to balk at $300/yr subscription but here we are forking over almost that much a month. Granted, I’m more diverse with AI than without it but still. I’m with you, best subscription I ever made.

I was puzzled by that at first, but I think it makes sense if you think about it this way: we made the IDE work (including all the magical AST transformations), but the AI does work on our behalf.

Paying for an IDE is fine. Letting them train their AI on your code isn't. I don't have the rights to give access to third parties. What I'm working on isn't even anything special, but that doesn't change the fact that I don't have permission to give JB access to it.

Edit: I misread the non-commercial bit. Regardless, I making it opt-in by default is scummy, imho.

How much do you trust them to keep it to "just" non-commercial though...

A big fuss about nothing. If you don’t pay for the IDE they will train on your data unless you opt-out and they will ask you if you want to opt-out _before_ they collect any data (on first launch after the update).

If you have a subscription then it’s opt-in.

That seems perfectly reasonable.

If you ask if you want to opt-out, then why isn't it opt-in which would be the definition of that...

Because they know, like everyone else, that opt-out results in more people not opting out.

Again, this is for the people using JetBrains IDEs for _free_. You can pay for a subscription and it becomes opt-in. I think it's completely reasonable for it to be opt-out or even required for the free product. Giving non-paying people a choice is a step above what I feel they are required to do (morally, ethically, etc).

> A big fuss about nothing. If you don’t pay for the IDE they will train on your data unless you opt-out and they will ask you if you want to opt-out _before_ they collect any data (on first launch after the update).

Not sure what I'm missing with spacemacs + LSP compared to vscode. (Spac)emacs does not train on my data. I don't pay for spacemacs.

It was the best of times and it was the worst of times...

They announced a price hike recently, and now this. I might not feel like renewing my license in a few months, actually.

I keep expecting them to be acquired by someone... with Microsoft being the most logical acquirer so they can go platform independent and shut down Visual Studio (finally).

Microsoft Rider would be welcome.

Visual Studio still would still be kept on mantainance mode for 10 to 20 years because of there's so much critical enterprise infrastructure that depends on it.

As more of that migrates to DotNet Core, it’s less and less reliant on Visual Studio (the behemoth).

It's a bit harder to acquire a profitable company that isn't publicly traded and wasn't VC funded ( Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help (2020) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25466304 ).

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