Inevitable Path for Proprietary Software
I bought my personal license of IntelliJ IDEA 3.0 with a free upgrade to 4.0 twenty days ago.
But I've heard people raising their concerns about the upcoming new release.
That leads me to think about what would happen to IDEA in the next few years:
- They will add features
- They will fix bugs
- They will raise prices (which they have done consistently in the past)
- They will make it an "enterprise tool" (for people and companies who have money to spend, but don't necessarily want anything done)
This seems to be the path taken by most proprietary software tools. Borland's offerings are examples. And I can't think of any proprietary tool that did not follow this path yet still survives after ten years.
Who knows? Maybe in five years we'll be buying IntelliJ IDEA Enterprise Edition for $5000 a piece for all the developers on our teams, which isn't a bad deal for the developers in St. Petersburg, Russia. :)