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I think the critics are missing one huge benefit: Most of their licenses are bought by companies. A company that buys a perpetual license now has no reason to u

I think the critics are missing one huge benefit: Most of their licenses are bought by companies. A company that buys a perpetual license now has no reason to upgrade unless the developers complain and prod; a company that buys a SaaS subscription enables its devs to upgrade to the newest versions as quickly as they want. For most of JetBrains actual corporate users, the upshot of this is that they'll never need to bug their managers to buy the new version, or suffer on years-old versions because of corporate inertia. That's a big win.

teacup50 11y ago
As an owner of a company, business continuity-destroying dependencies on SaaS is the opposite of a big win.
- thawkins 11y ago
  Nope, we just had to shut down our corporate evaluation of phpstorm because our org does not allow us to purchase locked in products with shut off mechanisms.
  - calgoo 11y ago
    That place actually sound like a nice place to work :) Im used to getting: "We need a 5 figure support contract from one of these 5 vendors".
tobltobs 11y ago
The most developers will never need to bug their managers because a subscription based solution is a no go for the financial department anyway. Corporations do like getting blackmailed as much as a indie developer.
- acdha 11y ago
  Most of the large organizations I've dealt with are fine with this because they like having someone to call for problems. “subscription” is the same as “support contract” for the accountants and that's something they're very used to: it converts an unknown risk of an expensive outage into a predictable annual expense.
  - hwstar 11y ago
    This is also known as having a "Throat to Choke" in IT circles.
- toyg 11y ago
  That's not necessarily the case. Corporations also love pre-tax operating expenses much more than depreciating capital expenditure. A lot of "cloud business" is moved by this simple accounting reality, rather than any technical benefit: renting AWS time might cost more than buying a server, but because the server is depreciating cap-ex, for your CFO it's actually the cheaper option. Miracles of finance, eh.
  - mark-r 11y ago
    Miracles of tax distortion, you mean.
bunderbunder 11y ago
I think it depends on the company. For a larger corporation where the act of managing pools of licenses is a significant expense and literally everything the business does is managed in terms of contracts that must be maintained via regular payments, this makes a whole lot of sense. Even if the licensing model costs a bit more on paper, it's probably still cheaper to them because of saving the cost of having someone spend time physically managing all those individual licenses every time someone switches projects or enters or leaves the company. For a smaller company or indie shop I'm not sure it's the same story. The calculus above depends on economies of scale to work out.

teacup50 11y ago

As an owner of a company, business continuity-destroying dependencies on SaaS is the opposite of a big win.

thawkins 11y ago
Nope, we just had to shut down our corporate evaluation of phpstorm because our org does not allow us to purchase locked in products with shut off mechanisms.
- calgoo 11y ago
  That place actually sound like a nice place to work :) Im used to getting: "We need a 5 figure support contract from one of these 5 vendors".

tobltobs 11y ago

The most developers will never need to bug their managers because a subscription based solution is a no go for the financial department anyway. Corporations do like getting blackmailed as much as a indie developer.

acdha 11y ago
Most of the large organizations I've dealt with are fine with this because they like having someone to call for problems. “subscription” is the same as “support contract” for the accountants and that's something they're very used to: it converts an unknown risk of an expensive outage into a predictable annual expense.
- hwstar 11y ago
  This is also known as having a "Throat to Choke" in IT circles.
toyg 11y ago
That's not necessarily the case. Corporations also love pre-tax operating expenses much more than depreciating capital expenditure. A lot of "cloud business" is moved by this simple accounting reality, rather than any technical benefit: renting AWS time might cost more than buying a server, but because the server is depreciating cap-ex, for your CFO it's actually the cheaper option. Miracles of finance, eh.
- mark-r 11y ago
  Miracles of tax distortion, you mean.

bunderbunder 11y ago

I think it depends on the company. For a larger corporation where the act of managing pools of licenses is a significant expense and literally everything the business does is managed in terms of contracts that must be maintained via regular payments, this makes a whole lot of sense. Even if the licensing model costs a bit more on paper, it's probably still cheaper to them because of saving the cost of having someone spend time physically managing all those individual licenses every time someone switches projects or enters or leaves the company. For a smaller company or indie shop I'm not sure it's the same story. The calculus above depends on economies of scale to work out.