I'm super happy JetBrains has been opening up all their editors to offer free access for non-commercial use. I've never made any money off of my occasional side projects, so I could never justify the cost to pay for a license when I may go an entire year without using. But I really love their editors - their key mappings are an extension of me at this point, it's so smart about figuring out how the code works and letting you find usages or refactor without thinking, and their git UI is basically the only way I find git tolerable.
I may or may not have been abusing the fact that my university let me keep my email address as an alumni to squeeze more years out of their free access for students, though that seemed to stop working for me at some point a year or 2 ago. But I'll happily take this instead!
They have this terrific plan where if you buy yearly subscription you will get the major version free for life even after you stop paying after one year.
I was pleasantly surprised when I discovered it. Been using it since then for like 3-4 years now.
It's CLion, Rider, RustRover, and WebStorm, IntelliJ is not on the list.
So far they haven't muddied the waters for any versions that already had free Community Editions (IntelliJ and PyCharm). The Community Editions are more limited, but don't restrict commercial use.
> The Community Editions are more limited, but don't restrict commercial use.
I've always wondered about this. I have the All-Products Pack subscription, don't get me wrong, but I used to have the Educational licence when I was in university. What was there to stop me from using it for commercial purposes? I get that the licence restrictions are likely more targeted towards medium to large businesses than little ol' me, but to what extent is it just an honour system? Just don't commit your .idea/ folder and basically no one would have any the wiser?
> I'm super happy JetBrains has been opening up all their editors to offer free access for non-commercial use.
All? That would be news to me! From the 10 IDEs (not counting ReSharper, which iss a plugin vor Visual Studio) listed on https://www.jetbrains.com/ides/#choose-your-ide, only CLion, Rider, RustRover and WebStorm are free for non-commercial use. Plus, each of the products has its own free or discounted licenses for certain users (e.g. students).
"Has been opening" is the present perfect continuous tense [0], which describes something that started in the past and is still ongoing. In TFA JetBrains says explicitly that this is a process that they intend to continue assuming it goes well.
I have been using PyCharm, IDEA and Android Studio for free for a while now. I'm not a student or any special category of user. I think you only get "core" features for free but they sure still among the most featureful IDEs that I have used.
I'm not sure why the staggered rollout, maybe there's strategic reasons certain ones will never have a free non-commercial license. But so far they've been consistently opening them up one-by-one.
It'll be interesting to see what they do for PyCharm and IntelliJ, which already have free Community Editions. Long term, I doubt they'll want to have two types of free version that restrict usage in completely different ways, but if they kill the Community Editions, anyone using them for commercial use will have to either build from source (hopefully the end of community editions wouldn't mean the end of the open source parts), start paying, or switch to an alternative.
I'm making zero predictions about what they'll do, there's a lot of ways it could go.
I may or may not have been abusing the fact that my university let me keep my email address as an alumni to squeeze more years out of their free access for students, though that seemed to stop working for me at some point a year or 2 ago. But I'll happily take this instead!