It's my personal opinion that one only gets complaining rights if one doesn't use Gmail, one doesn't subscribe to NetFlix, one doesn't use Spotify, ad nauseum.
JetBrains is making a business decision. That's what businesses do. Their current Community Edition is open-source. Anyone is free to pick up where they left off. That is an enormous contribution they've already made to the community. You make your consumer decision. They make their business decision. This is the implicit but very real relationship any customer of theirs has chosen to be in.
I personally don't agree with their decision. But, I'm not running their business or working their jobs. Before going all "They're Google Reader'ing Us.", just ask yourself, do you use Gmail? Are you willing to continue their work on the Community Edition?
edit: to clarify my examples.
The services I referenced where chosen as examples of alternatives to options such as hosting one's own email or using existing perpetually or open-sourced licensed products (Gmail), a company that drastically revised it's product offering (NetFlix), and a company who's founder destroyed the business model of purchasing a c.d. for life by making mp3's user friendly and then went legit by moving to a SaaS model (Spotify).
As others have pointed out, one can still purchase a perpetual license through November, so JetBrains is not only not stealing back the product they sold you, they are also giving you time whether you'd like to make this transition with them. If not, simply do not purchase their product in the future. To expect JetBrains to do otherwise (maintain their business model) is to tell them how to make very basic decisions about how they run their business and live their lives. That, I think, is bad.
tl;dr: They didn't steal anything. Don't tell people how to live their lives.
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?
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.
> 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).
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
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?
It's my personal opinion that one only gets complaining rights if one doesn't use Gmail, one doesn't subscribe to NetFlix, one doesn't use Spotify, ad nauseum.
That does not make sense. Spotify et al. were like that from the beginning. You know what kind of deal you are getting. JetBrains is changing the rules of the game completely, with very little heads-up time, for people who might be deeply invested in their products.
It's comparable to what Adobe pulled off: they knew that most people did not have a choice, so they could force it on them. Luckily, the IDE landscape is a bit more healthy, so I expect that a subset of their customers will flee to other IDEs.
On top of that, it's the difference between monthly costs for the company. Netflix, Spotify and Gmail all have monthly costs in terms of storage space, bandwidth usage, server maintenance, etc that users are directly affecting. You're paying for the content to always be available, to be available quickly and to not have limits on what you can and can't access.
Desktop software on the other hand has no direct monthly costs other than phoning home once a month. You could definitely argue that iterating development costs should be factored in here, I can't imagine that being a deciding factor in moving completely to this business model. I'm sure if they offered a low cost monthly subscription and a perpetual license option, they wouldn't have any issue offsetting development costs. At this point, they could even raise the price of perpetual license (hell, I seem to remember paying $200 for mine). I'd gladly pay an increased price with the knowledge that my software wouldn't stop working, especially given how many hours of productivity I gain by using their software.
>> the IDE landscape is a bit more healthy, so I expect that a subset of their customers will flee to other IDEs.
Agreed.
I dropped most of Adobe's products after they went to a subscription based model. The only product I still use is Photoshop and I'm planning on dropping that later this year so I can move 100% to Linux.
For the record, over 95% of the front-end devs I know use Sublime Text for their IDE.
I just have to add, I just tried to install ReSharper 8.1 in VS 2015 (since I bought 8.1 last year), and it doesn't work. So yeah, JetBrains is already doing these Jackass-like slimy tactics with their perpetual licensing, when there isn't really any reason why they should restrict it to VS 2013.
It looks like even when you purchase a ReSharper license, the software will work for about a year. So subscriptions aren't that much worse.
I use IntelliJ, phpStorm and pyCharm all on a regular business. But I work for a university and just assume that the subscriptions won't lapse. That may be a bad assumption given that I control the departments budget and it would come out of my allocations if the cost go up. Mixed feelings on this change. But I really like the three products I use and will continue to use them.
If you regularly use/upgrade lots of their products then this new scheme should work out cheaper. The people who potentially lose out are the people who only used one of their cheaper products and people who go several years without upgrading.
Or, if you are on their flagship product (IntelliJ IDEA). Sure, you save a whopping 10 Euro per year. But suddenly, you have a subscription rather than owning a perpetual license. Sounds like a bad deal.
How exactly do you think more "heads-up time" would improve the situation? Either you are gonna stick with JetBrains and their product, in which case heads-up is irrelevant, or you are gonna switch to a competing product, in which case heads-up wouldn't help either: you will still need to learn the new product, regardless of when you switch.
If you want to stay on a perpetual licenses for a little longer (to see how everything pans out), you now have to buy it within two months and not at your planned upgrade term, otherwise you lose that option.
Another benefit of more time would be that in a corporation where purchases are not as simple as pulling the trigger, you have some time to do the paperwork to get the subscription approved, while still continuing in the current update scheme until then.
Let me actually clarify what you are saying for you, as I see this sentiment quite often and it drives me nuts.
You are saying that as a paying customer, one is not allowed to question any product or service offering they pay for (or even will potentially pay for as a potential customer). One is not allowed to suggest improvements. One is not allowed to state that if the company would modify the offering in some way, then they would again become a paying customer. One's only choices are to pay for the product/service as is or walk away and keep quiet.
One is also not allowed to mention to friends/acquaintances/colleagues that they are dissatisfied with the overall value of a product or service, or indicate that they do not believe the overall value to be worth it. As before, one's only choices here are to give good recommendations of the product/service to others or to not say anything at all.
"Take what we offer or walk away quietly and never speak of this again, those are your only choices."
This is essentially what you are saying. Are you sure that is what you want to be saying?
They should be happy that the customers are complaining, it gives them a chance to consider their concerns. I just usually walk away without warning if I'm unhappy with a product, customers like me force businesses to do a lot of detective work to find out the reasons for bad retention.
JetBrains is making a business decision. That's what businesses do. Their current Community Edition is open-source. Anyone is free to pick up where they left off. That is an enormous contribution they've already made to the community. You make your consumer decision. They make their business decision. This is the implicit but very real relationship any customer of theirs has chosen to be in.
I personally don't agree with their decision. But, I'm not running their business or working their jobs. Before going all "They're Google Reader'ing Us.", just ask yourself, do you use Gmail? Are you willing to continue their work on the Community Edition?
edit: to clarify my examples.
The services I referenced where chosen as examples of alternatives to options such as hosting one's own email or using existing perpetually or open-sourced licensed products (Gmail), a company that drastically revised it's product offering (NetFlix), and a company who's founder destroyed the business model of purchasing a c.d. for life by making mp3's user friendly and then went legit by moving to a SaaS model (Spotify).
As others have pointed out, one can still purchase a perpetual license through November, so JetBrains is not only not stealing back the product they sold you, they are also giving you time whether you'd like to make this transition with them. If not, simply do not purchase their product in the future. To expect JetBrains to do otherwise (maintain their business model) is to tell them how to make very basic decisions about how they run their business and live their lives. That, I think, is bad.
tl;dr: They didn't steal anything. Don't tell people how to live their lives.