$100-$500 is a bit much, but I'd have been happy with some increase (10%? 15%?).
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.
It's absolutely about the price. If I told you you need to rent them, but the price for renting for the next 15 years is negligible, I don't think you'd have a problem with renting them. Now our only disagreement is on what constitutes "negligible".
No it isn't. I would pay twice as much as I did for PyCharm, but I want software that I can control which doesn't phone home to the mothership to see if I have the privilege of being able to use it for that month.
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.
You're complaining about bugs you haven't encountered yet. If the software simply defaulted to working when it couldn't contact a licensing server, would that resolve things?
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.
I take your point regarding phoning home. I also think that's a problem.
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.
No it is not about the price, it is about my dev tools needing to call the mother ship every month to make sure I am still a valid user.
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.
Besides calling home, what motivation do they have to improve their tools under the subscription model? Upgrades have to be appealing enough to bother paying – built-in motivation to produce a superior product.
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.
