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It's worth noting that JetBrains has a long history of successfully competing against free IDEs, which were normally always more popular than IntelliJ. First th
by mike_hearn 4y ago
It's worth noting that JetBrains has a long history of successfully competing against free IDEs, which were normally always more popular than IntelliJ. First there was NetBeans (bought and open sourced by Sun very early), then there was Eclipse (developed and open sourced by IBM), now there is VSCode. Heck there are probably others I don't know about. So, this is nothing new for them.
Usually what happens is that after enough years have passed, the company funding the free IDE starts to wonder why exactly they're spending so much money to give away the results. The original passion-project founders have moved on, leaving behind maintenance devs who aren't motivated to defend it. Eventually it gets stripped to a handful of devs and donated to Apache. In the meantime IntelliJ continues to develop new features.
The question VSCode users might wonder about is what's Microsoft's strategy here? They have plenty of money, but then again so did Sun/Oracle and IBM. Is there a long term commercial plan to let the VSCode team justify themselves.
- vladvasiliu 4y ago> The question VSCode users might wonder about is what's Microsoft's strategy here? They have plenty of money, but then again so did Sun/Oracle and IBM. Is there a long term commercial plan to let the VSCode team justify themselves. Exactly, especially since VSCode is also an "open-core" product, just like JetBrain's products (the community versions are open-source). The difference is that the other parts are still free, as in beer. But this is precisely what makes the offer weird to me and makes me think there's a shady angle being played.
- mike_hearn 4y agoWell, I doubt it's shady. Seems more likely they don't know what to charge for it and are incentivized to create user growth rather than revenue growth.