Most of their IDEs you can use for free for non-commercial purposes and even if you need to buy them; when you compare software development to any other profession our tools are incredibly cheap. You can get all the Jetbrains IDEs for less than 300€. Compare that to a HDL simulator or a 3D CAD application like Autodesk. These easily cost several thousand euros each year.

[–] masterspace@lemmy.ca 22 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (1 children)

Autocad costs that much because Autodesk behaves anti-competitively and has locked firms into their proprietary tooling / file formats / training and the firms have no choice but to keep paying them.

Their predatory behaviour towards the engineering industry is literally why I taught myself programming and switched to software development.

They are a prime example of why you shouldn't build your company around closed source proprietary software, but open source software that can be forked or self hosted in a worst case scenario.

[–] thevoidzero@lemmy.world 4 points 2 days ago

Dam. Finally someone else who did something similar. I also changed my focus into more GIS and programming oriented work because of AutoCAD being what it is. I like working on open source software because I don't suddenly lose all my work because I ran out of license or left my job.

[–] kautau@lemmy.world 5 points 3 days ago (1 children)

You mean subscribe to them right? You can't buy Jetbrains products to use in perpetuity. I pay for their all products pack. They have a 40% continuity discount after two years, which is nice. I would agree they aren't terribly expensive for commercial software, but they are competing in a space full of free and/or open source alternatives, unlike many production-level commercial softwares.

That being said, their AI integration features are awful across the board, whether it's their own AI or copilot.

And while I much prefer jetbrains stuff to something like vscode, it's way more about UI uniformity for me. VS Code extensions outside the top 20 tend to slap themselves wherever they want, with html/css dialogues that don't fit the UI, and there's often like 6 versions of an extension that's like "this one is deprecated, but also the other one is deprecated, but the new one is made by microsoft but it's actually 3 extensions now." Whereas generally jetbrains extensions fit within my action panel, toolbar items, and can move widgets to different sides of the UI so that version control stuff, code analysis/structure stuff, external integration/database stuff, and project trees all get their own dedicated part of the workspace

[–] e8d79@discuss.tchncs.de 14 points 3 days ago (1 children)

You can just buy them for one year and keep using the perpetual fallback license. Also, they can fuck right off with their planet incinerating automatic plagiarism chat bots.

[–] kautau@lemmy.world 3 points 2 days ago

That’s pretty awesome, I didn’t know they had that. Seems like the sort of thing that should be like an EU enforced license structure. If anything it would make Adobe pucker their buttholes considering their asinine and predatory pricing strategy.

[–] RustyNova@lemmy.world 1 points 2 days ago

True. Doesn't solve the other issue tho. Heck, I work on rust a lot, and rustrover is free