Paying annually for support and to receive upgrades feels very reasonable. My IDE ceasing to function because I've stopped paying annually does not.
But on the other hand, considering I'm already paying $158 for two of their products every year (IDEA and AppCode), being able to pay $149 (discounted rate) and also get a separate app for RubyMine and PyCharm seems like a very nice offer. (Since Ruby/Python plugins in IDEA always lacked few versions behind.)
Nevertheless, I'm sad that to see another one of my most-used software goes away from perpetual license to subscription model.
Good examples of the way to do this, include Cakewalk and Allegorithmic which both implement a form of pay-to-own. After enough payments, you own a product that you can keep using if you no longer need 'enhancements'.
Whilst software-as-a-service is great for many people, it's not a panacea and certainly not a replacement for people who just want a product that they buy once and can use when they like without further outlay.
However, from November, that will no longer be possible. If Jetbrains decides, in 2016, to increase the license fee to $300 per year, or $500, then we will have 2 options: Pay it and continue to have access, or don't pay, and lose all access to the tools, despite the fact that we have already given you money. If I have a cashflow problem, I can no longer decide to stay with last year's version for a while, instead I lose access.
I'm sure you know this, I'm sure everyone at JetBrains knows this.
Or even more likely (for an IDE that is ahead quite a lot): charge the same license fee, but don't supply any interesting new features.
This is one of my fundamental objections to the subscription model. In the perpetual license model, a company has to entice its customers every major version to shell out the money. How do you do this? By making the product even better. In the subscription model, that direct incentive is gone, the customer has to pay anyway.
> On the other hand, we think we’ll be able to concentrate on quality more than trying to impress users with new features so they buy upgrades. Our products are more than feature-full and we believe the quality is something that can always be improved.
Translation: We've run out of things that we think you'll actually want to pay for, so we've decided to force you to pay instead.
The whole point of the licensing change and the switch to a service is to remove the perpetual license. No money, no IDE.
However, I cannot subscribe under the new terms, and keep using the software if I decide to stop subscribing. Earlier in this thread you suggested that we could subscribe for a month and keep using the software afterwards. This is incorrect. Once you stop subscribing, you lose the rights to use the software