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I meant that it gives Kotlin adopters the sense that there is no vendor lock-in on the code they write, while at the same time they keep a strong bind on the pr

I meant that it gives Kotlin adopters the sense that there is no vendor lock-in on the code they write, while at the same time they keep a strong bind on the present and future market IDE for Kotlin (if a competitor appears, Jetbrains will be first to market for everything Kotlin so they will have a persistent edge), capturing with the IDE the dollars of those who seriously plan to develop for Kotlin. The fact that they have a freemium model is irrelevant to that goal of owing the Kotlin IDE space. The free offering you mention is used both for funnelling or for having customers do the market segmentation themselves, as there are customers that want to pay for everyone in the team, there are customers who want to pay for only some of members of the team and those who do not want to pay for anyone in the team.

pjmlp 6y ago
They even asserted this on their blog, Kotlin is a means to sell InteliJ licenses. https://blog.jetbrains.com/kotlin/2011/08/why-jetbrains-needs-kotlin/ https://blog.jetbrains.com/kotlin/2011/08/why-jetbrains-need... > The next thing is also fairly straightforward: we expect Kotlin to drive the sales of IntelliJ IDEA. We’re working on a new language, but we do not plan to replace the entire ecosystem of libraries that have been built for the JVM. So you’re likely to keep using Spring and Hibernate, or other similar frameworks, in your projects built with Kotlin. And while the development tools for Kotlin itself are going to be free and open-source, the support for the enterprise development frameworks and tools will remain part of IntelliJ IDEA Ultimate, the commercial version of the IDE. And of course the framework support will be fully integrated with Kotlin.