Yes and the contractor issue is important. Like most contractors in the UK I work through a limited company for tax reasons; that means the tools have to be owned by the company.

However... in effect I am the company, no one else will use it. JetBrains need to give us an official answer on that situation. I qualify for the personal license, but I have to enter a VAT number

i have a personal licence and use it for work. no-one has sued me. it's my ide. i bought it. i use it. that is how i expect things to work.

surely the commercial licence is for when a company is buying it, and expects to have N programmers, who are replaceable, using it at any one time. that's a completely different use case.

the only frustrating thing is that if you have multiple machines (say a desktop and a laptop) and switch between them (eg working one project on the laptop in living room; leaving the ide open for another project in the office) then it complains. you can fix this by blocking some firewall port (bonjour iirc). oh, that and the complete LACK OF SUPPORT FOR C / C++... in intellij idea.

Personal license means it's in your name, nothing more. Whereas Commercial license means it's in your company's name and therefore unnamed, so it does not belong to a single individual but to the company.

The way I understood it, a personal license is if you're paying for it (and the company isn't reimbursing you for it). You can still use it for commercial purposes.

Personal license means I can use it. Company license means the company can let me, or any ONE else at the company use it.