>Free for non commercial use
I like to recreationally overthink sometimes:
Most of us code in hopes that the thing we make is cool and useful, and it's a good thing if the thing we make catches on and becomes popular. Some might even say if they could make a living off their creation, they'd love that.
Given that this site is what it is, -most- of us have financial ambitions, with code as the means to an end to get us that money.
Back to the free for non commercial use stipulation, I'm just wondering how practical is this model? Is it expected that people do periodic reviews of the success of their projects and make some sort of subjective judgement when they should pay for a license?
Is there room for some other business model to more viably compete with vscode and vscode-forks that are free, while still creating paychecks for JetBrains?
I treat the spirit of these licenses as: "if you have reasonable expectation of making money from your use of it, please buy a license. Otherwise, we appreciate the mindshare."
Practically speaking, the license is probably much closer to "if you are making prodigious amounts of money, and you are using our software, then you had better buy a license to avoid a legal situation."
And if I were making prodigious amounts of money I'd be happy to go back and pay JetBrains the $274.8 a year that RubyMine costs per person for a company license. Aside being the decent thing to do, I'd like to contribute to JetBrains so they continue updating a tool that helped me build my company.
So any VC funded startup should use for free in your opinion?