Even taxi drivers invest more money than software developers in the tools that they use every day, and software developers make quite a bit more money than taxi drivers.
I don't want to open the travel laptop I keep stored for when I'm away from home in an airplane or the middle of nowhere and be interrupted because I can't contact a licensing server or whatever such bullshit.
If they want to raise prices, that's fine. But renting tools that are not hosted on the web, for myself and lot of other people, is just a big no-no.
But really, you can't blame software providers. In the old days they'd all do the one-off purchasing model, and then they would all starve to death because people don't want to pay for software. So it's no wonder they're going for a model which is actually proven to work, which is a subscription.
I want shit that works, unconditionally. If JetBrains can't give me that, I'll start looking elsewhere.
(Or... How many people pay for WinRAR?)
Having the tool ping a server every week doesn't make the tool any harder to crack, and cracked versions obviously don't ping the server, so there's no reason whatever to be draconian about what happens when the check doesn't go through.
At least that's the approach they took at Adobe. IIRC the tool worked normally for up to a month without pinging the server, and after that showed warnings but kept working for a while. The times may have changed but idea was to err as far as possible on the side of lenience, because anyone using a version that pings the server is by definition a paying customer and not a pirate.
Just keep the option for a perpetual license thanks. Even if it means increasing the cost, I am fine with that. I just don't want to rent my tools as a professional.
With subscriptions, they don't have to improve the software; it's guaranteed revenue as long as one wants to use the tool. Eventually a competitor might step in and create something better, but until then you're stuck paying whether or not the software is improving.
A modest increase, with a discount for moving to a subscription model (like they're trying to do) would have appealed to all camps, imo. Professionals recognize these are good tools, and want to support them, but not necessarily in a 'one size fits all' SaaS model.
Instead of $199 intellij ultimate license, saying "Buy a perpetual license for $229, or a SaaS model for $149/year"... I would probably still opt for perpetual (at least some of their products), but having the option is important, imo.
Much like the OP talking of not being able to do development if your employer fails to approve the payment in time. Resharper is nice and all but you can actually write C# without it. (I know PyCharm etc might be harder but the article was about Resharper).
I'm getting a bit of an extremist regarding SaaS, I'm happy to admit it. It's just that, the more it gets shoved in all sorts of businesses it doesn't really belong, the more I realize is just a form of very modern rent-seeking.
When a product-making business moves to a forced SaaS model, it's basically admitting defeat: it says the market does not value their work enough to profit from innovation alone, so from now on it will extract rent from established customers. That is depressing and exploitative.
I'm happy to have the option to turn my product-buying into a recurring event; but at the end of the day, in most cases I want to buy products, not to subscribe to a book-buying club. This because products change, in some cases for the worse. PyCharm in a few years might drop support for Python 2 (or something equivalent); why should I not be able to run an old installer I paid for whenever I need to work with Python 2 ?
I fear sooner or later somebody will file a class-action suit, and a lot of people will be sorry.
The value of actual SaaS is that the expensive management of the software has been taken off you hands.
>taxi drivers invest more money than software developers
Citation needed.
>software developers make quite a bit more money than taxi drivers.
You are assuming that everyone who develops software is employed as a software developer. There is fine work done by hobbyists and independents.
> Citation needed.
Pretty sure that for the price of a car, including maintenance, you could pay for a nice workstation and multiple monitors with lots of "expensive" software on a subscription model.
> You are assuming that everyone who develops software is employed as a software developer. There is fine work done by hobbyists and independents.
If you're developing open-source software, you can probably get a free license for many IDEs. If you're both a hobbyist, don't want to release your software as open-source, and expect to be given top-rate tools for a cheap price...
Most taxi drivers don't own their own car. The person that owns the car and own the medallion taxes the driver, typically but not always, a percentage of the drivers income[0].
[0]: http://work.chron.com/much-fare-taxi-drivers-keep-22871.html