> they try to achieve a relatively modest increase
Looking at their (current) pricing model for this, it seems like a drive for more predictable income, instead of additional profit. The ability to depend on getting X dollars per month makes it a lot easier to hire employees on, and justify working on the products.
And for many folks, Jetbrains will be getting less money out of them, since they're offering quite a deal for anyone who works with more than one of the products.
> fairly unjustified SaaS model
Except that they are providing constant, incremental upgrades to their tools as part of the model. That alone acts as fairly strong justification for a subscription model.
> Instead of driving sales with innovation, they now drive it with fear
Anybody who fears being unable to pay a $20 monthly bill is very unlikely to have paid $200 up front for the tool in the first place. Double that for any company who fears this new cost; they're already ponying up over ten grand per employee, another $20 isn't going bankrupt them.
To go back to the woodworker analogy - the woodworker who can't afford to replace the worn blade in their bandsaw has bigger problems than the monthly cost of consumables.
Anybody who fears being unable to pay a $20 monthly bill is very unlikely to have paid $200 up front for the tool in the first place.
I avoid subscription software not because of the price, but because if I stop paying or the company goes out of business the software stops working. Say I completely change industries, then ten years later I want to go back and look at my old projects. If I was using a subscription (IDE|audio editor|DAW|video editor), I won't be able to preserve my historic work.
For some proprietary formats (such as Microsoft Word, PDFs, or photoshop PSD files), this is absolutely the case. However, when it comes to code, the format is _unicode text_. There's very little danger of losing your code to the sands of time because a company whose product you used to write that _unicode text_ went out of business.
Of course, businesses are realizing danger and are publishing specs to their proprietary file formats as well, so even in 50 years someone can re-create a document which would have previously been lost. For example, https://www.adobe.com/devnet-apps/photoshop/fileformatashtml...
An IDE is not just a text editor. There is a nontrivial amount of configuration that goes in a build system, and the IDE takes care of some of it. Having to ditch the IDE often means having to manually reconfigure a good chunk of the build system, as well as tracking down the exact version of build tools the IDE was shipping with in a particular release.
And this just for IDEs. Intellij also ship a lot of tools (youtrack etc) which may or may not be replaceable without significant data loss.
Note that YouTrack and other tools are not moving to subscription licensing, only the IDEs are.
Pretty much everyone has their project set up to be able to build via an external tool for CI anyway. I'm really not seeing the lock-in argument here, except that moving back to Eclipse would be painful for a lot of people. But I don't see why you would go through that pain now if you're currently happy with what you get from JetBrains for the money that you're paying.
Looking at their (current) pricing model for this, it seems like a drive for more predictable income, instead of additional profit. The ability to depend on getting X dollars per month makes it a lot easier to hire employees on, and justify working on the products.
And for many folks, Jetbrains will be getting less money out of them, since they're offering quite a deal for anyone who works with more than one of the products.
> fairly unjustified SaaS model
Except that they are providing constant, incremental upgrades to their tools as part of the model. That alone acts as fairly strong justification for a subscription model.
> Instead of driving sales with innovation, they now drive it with fear
Anybody who fears being unable to pay a $20 monthly bill is very unlikely to have paid $200 up front for the tool in the first place. Double that for any company who fears this new cost; they're already ponying up over ten grand per employee, another $20 isn't going bankrupt them.
To go back to the woodworker analogy - the woodworker who can't afford to replace the worn blade in their bandsaw has bigger problems than the monthly cost of consumables.