Note that the title says &#x27;customer loyalty&#x27;. I think IntelliJ et al. became popular through word of mouth of developers (that&#x27;s how I started using IntelliJ and I recommended it to many others).<p>If those developers go from &#x27;IntelliJ is great and the JetBrains people rock&#x27; to &#x27;IntelliJ may be great, but JetBrains is scammy&#x27;, it may be bad for growth.<p>Of course, one can assume that they calculated in some protests + losing customers.