To analogize this, imagine the perfectly cromulent subscription model of printed magazine delivery.  You pay $X, and they mail you a new wad of glossy paper every month.  If you don&#x27;t pay $X, you just don&#x27;t get new magazines.  You can still read all the old ones.  Remember National Geographic?  Remember how your grandfather kept huge stacks of them that were all only an awkward elbow away of toppling onto the floor?  Presuming you could locate it in the stacks, you could re-read the article about Elbonian mud-rakers as often as you pleased.<p>If you subscribed to JetBrains&#x27;s magazine, you pay $X, and every month they give you a new magazine, and take back the previous month&#x27;s issue.  If you stop paying, they would come to your house, confiscate your latest issue, and then search the premises to make sure you weren&#x27;t keeping any older issues, or any photographs or copies of them.  If you want to read something, it&#x27;ll just have to be something else, like RMS&#x27;s free gnewsletter.<p>What JetBrains is doing is <i>not</i> switching to a subscription model.  They are switching to a DRM-enforced <i>rental</i> model.<p>Subscriptions are ideal from products that are consumable or otherwise ephemeral.  Television shows or newspapers or foods or coupons or pharmaceutical drugs work for that.  Things that are used once and discarded are perfect for subscriptions.<p>Rental is good for things that have a low marginal benefit in comparison to their upfront costs, such that it takes a long time to recover that initial investment.  You rent a hotel room for a night or two.  You rent a car when you fly to another city.  You rent a pneumatic excavator when you only have one hole to dig.  You rent things that you do not intend to use enough to justify paying their purchase price.<p>With respect to a tool of the trade--something you buy to help you make more money--you emphatically want to own that, rather than just rent it.  That&#x27;s a great argument for using open-source IDEs.  Even the previous model was just a perpetual license with a limited-time upgrade option.  The person who wants you to forever rent the tools of your own trade is not doing so with your own best interests in mind.