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Comment by arkh | Hacker News Reader

Most professional developers in Western countries should have the means to pay for their own license if really needed.

My employer has a policy forbidding the use of software that I personally paid for. Free software is fine for some reason.

This is usually because the software you pay for yourself has licensing terms that don’t allow commercial use or reimbursement. See the JetBrains personal license terms itself. Understandably, the company will find it easier and cheaper to forbid use than hire a lawyer to check each license for each software that each employee wants to use.

If your employer allows you to pay for development software, they can get into legal issues.

Companies (depending on jurisdiction) are not allowed to make employees pay for items necessary for work.

And allowing employees to pay can easily be misinterpreted into subtly pressuring employees to pay.

It's not about having the means, it's about most companies having policies and processes structured around common software used by all employees in a similar position to allow for collaboration, and to ensure compliance with whatever governance and licenses apply. You don't see orgs where some devs can choose GitHub, others GitLab. IDEs are more interchangeable, of course, but each developer having to set up their own config from scratch (correct plugins, build config, testing framework, etc.) would be a colossal waste of time for no reason.

Some bigger orgs allow flexibility (devs can pick Mac or Linux-based laptops, VS Code or JetBrains as the IDE, etc.), but not bring your own with your own license.

That doesn’t make it permissible to run the software on company equipment, necessarily.

Yeah, specifically it will frequently (1) violate employer policy to use it on emoloyer equipment if not approved and, providing licensing is required, licensed by the employer, and (2) violate the license of the software to use it when it is not licensed to the employer.

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