I left my last company (pretty large, ~1500 employees at the time IIRC) for a variety of reasons, but that was the primary driver. I'd joined on when they were privately owned by the guy who founded it. Then they got some private equity investment group to buy out part of the company. Then they did an IPO. Everyone was SUPER excited about the IPO. I didn't pay too much attention, I was focused on the product my team was building. ESOP was nice. But within a year we were being pushed hard to cut corners and get a half-baked version of the product out to market instead of building it to do the job well like we'd planned from day 1. Ironically, if we hadn't been constantly badgered and having our priorities flipped back and forth, I bet we would have had a useful, functional version of the initial plan out the door by the time I left, with the proper foundation to keep building and expanding it to solve the problems our customers were experiencing with the old system. But now the old system's problems are deeply embedded in the new system, because it was quicker to shove out the door that way.
On the contrary, the place I'm at now is a much smaller company, and the founder/CEO has stated in no uncertain terms that we'll never be sold out to investors because it would mean that we'd be beholden to interests contrary to building the product our customers want and running the company in a long-term sustainable manner.
Ha! Heard that one before. Company was sold. Founder got filthy rich, bean counters came in, you know the rest.
I liked the look of Zed when I first tried it out, but I read that it seems to have a strong cloud/AI focus which I don't want or need. I have started investing a bit of time in getting Vim working with all the bells and whistles and now it's a decent fallback when I can't use a JetBrains IDE for whatever reason.
My preferred IDE was what Jetbrains had before with IDEA - you could plug in basic support for the languages you want and edit as you go. I don't want to set up a superheavy environment with all the bells and whistles, I want Intellisense and tree-sitter in a relatively zippy interface. That was what Jetbrains offered before, and it's what I can't have anymore.
Making Rider free to try is the correct strategy for them. Obviously they want to compete directly with VSCode, but they're burning a lot of good will in their existing customer base in the process.
But being a public company wouldn't make it any better.
As a customer: They're making gaming on Linux awesome, and my SteamDeck has killed off my console usage (YMMV), I love it so much. I'm way happier to buy games on Steam where it funds cool initiatives like that than on Epic where a big chunk of the value is accrued by TenCent and Disney.
As a game dev Steam also brings a lot of value: A big customer base, to the point where a game with mid-tier popularity can still do brisk business (not nearly as true on Epic). Their backend is unintuitive but has loads more features than EOS. They also offer really cool tech like SDR (Steam Datagram Relay), etc. If you're selling a PC game, there's no better place to be and you get value for the premium.
People publishing games just have to do the math and see if the benefits justify the costs.
I am sure the public market has made the general public reap the rewards of large companies (kudos!) but some of the privately owned companies are absolutely kicking ass to serve their customers instead.
Rider is a really great product - probably the next generation of coders will be split between VS Code and Rider with this change.