I think their all-you-can-eat subscription deal is pretty good value. I use Intellij Ultimate but I have messed around with Appcode and Rubymine in the past and wanted to give CLion a go. I remember a while ago thinking 'surely they do some all you can eat package' and finding they didn't. This has answered it.

Realise that the same model doesn't work for everyone but the subscription deal for all-you-can-eat is damn good.

Pretty tough to pirate their products in the first place, and I imagine "phone home" type applications will only make it harder.

Especially when they already have a community edition in place, I think more people will use that.

It's probably tough to pirate their products in the first place because there isn't much of an incentive to crack them. It's not like a Call of Duty release where kids with no money the world over want the product. This is a tool for professionals, the kind of people who can shell out a couple billable hours worth of cash or get a license from their employer.

From what I have seen it is pretty trivial (at least if you were around in the 90s)

> everybody is using their IDEs

And I think that's a shame, because I prefer NetBeans over IntelliJ. I've used both, and IntelliJ's Maven integration is just terrible.

Please elaborate, I havent used Netbeans for a while but it really sucked compared even to eclipse. Also never had any problems with maven integration on IntelliJ.

IntelliJ likes to maintain two build systems. It has its own project files that keep track of dependencies and how to build things. Changes made to the POM have to be imported into IntelliJ's project format, if you build or run something in IntelliJ, it's not necessarily the same build Maven would perform, because IntelliJ is invoking java and javac itself without going through mvn.

NetBeans, on the other hand, uses the POM itself as its project file for everything it can. All dependency information exists only in the POM, and NetBeans reads it directly. What little bit NetBeans needs that doesn't go in the POM goes in nbactions.xml (e.g. main class, path to JVM), which is very small and minimal, and there's no duplication of data between the two. The NetBeans project file is just the tuple of (pom.xml, nbactions.xml). I've encountered many instances where IntelliJ and Maven get their dependency trees desynced, and while sometimes it can be solved by re-importing the POM, other times it can't, and resolving it becomes this huge hairy nightmare.

Better yet, whenever you initiate a build or run anything in NetBeans using a Maven project, it simply invokes mvn through a shell. You can see in the output tab the exact Maven command line NetBeans ran, so you can duplicate it or send it as instructions to collaborators who don't necessarily use NetBeans.

I have to use IntelliJ at my current job, and I find myself just using it as an editor and building by manually invoking Maven on the command line myself (and the company has our own system of scripts for running our Java projects).

Maven is a first-class project format in NetBeans, whereas IntelliJ still needs to create its own project structure and metadata. So it seems less than ideal from that perspective. But having had to use IntelliJ for a while, I'm now comfortable with its way of handling Maven. I understand why it is the way it is: IntelliJ is a multi-stack IDE, whereas Maven is a Java-specific project format. IntelliJ has a project format that works across all their IDEs (except AppCode) and IntelliJ is just an all-in-one IDE, not just a Java IDE.

I 100% agreed with you until I tried to run NetBeans on a MacBook Pro Retina (current model, fully specced out). It's so terribly slow at that high resolution.