Subscription-based models are a plague, but at least Jetbrains products eventually offer a perpetual fallback license for if you stop paying.
It’s absurd that Adobe can just take tools you might depend on away after years of paying the subscription.
The basic software like the Intellij Community Edition is also fully open source. (And it’s not actually basic at all. It’s a great full featured IDE)
Basically you’re only paying for their support/updates and for specific language and toolkit support, which makes sense to me. They need to pay their staff somehow.
It’s not comparable to Adobe or other crappy manufacturers where you own nothing.
What do you mean with perpetual fallback license?
If you stop the subscription, you don’t get upgrades. But you keep whatever the last version you had, it’s not locked out by a license check.
Basically when you buy your subscription you also get perpetual access to the current X.Y.Z version + any future bugfixes (Z). So if you stop paying next year you still have access to the version from when your started your subscription.
Some JetBrains IDEs are fully open source. Does Adobe have anything like that?
Brackets, although its unmaintained
JetBrains might not be my friend but they don’t hold anywhere near the dev tool monopoly Adobe does for artists. Know what happens if JetBrains starts to blow massive ass? I finally sit down and figure out how to get my terminal editor working with my LSP. Yeah I lose some productivity but not as much as I’d lose by using Visual Studio or fuckn Eclipse.
I think another key difference is everyone can use whatever tool they like and still work on the same codebase. They don’t have proprietary file formats that lock in you and your entire team forever.
