this post was submitted on 07 Oct 2025
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This is misleading. For people paying for the IDE nothing changed, data sharing remains an opt-in option. For users of their free licenses data sharing was enabled by default. Still a shitty thing to do especially as it hits a lot of OSS developers but lets criticize that instead of creating memes that are misinformation.
I don't think it's misleading, or at leas the point was not to imply that they are forcing the data collection (which they are, for free users, but it is opt-out). The point is that they are actually downright emotionally manipulating in the blogpost. The blogpost in which they announce it, at least in my opinion, is written in exactly the same tone as the picture. They are basically crying that they can't make a good AI without stealing your private data, pleading you to turn it on.
I've seen a few similar posts of products announcing AI data collection, and this one was the most unsettling, hence the meme.
You do add important detail, but I'd make the counterpoint that if the corporation is bullying their least privileged users today, stealing their ~~lunch money~~ privacy, they're not going to stop with only them. This is testing the waters for them.
Plus - it's also messed up that they can fundamentally change the nature of the 501(c)(3) donated version and will likely try to claim a tax benefit as though it's equivalent to a paid copy.
As the saying goes, if a product is free then that means you are the product
In this case, the product was free to OSS developers not because they were the product, but because they're influencers likely to end up encouraging their users and/or employers to buy the paid version, so it was the marketing that those people could do that was the product.
This change with the data harvesting makes those developers the product, though.
They're doing as much of a bad thing as they think they can get away with. I don't feel a particular duty to carefully acknowledge that in some circumstances they feel obligated to do the right thing instead. If they don't like the "misleading" aspects of that, they're free to just do the right thing completely.
This may be controversial, but trying to collect the data of your free users to offset the costs of the infrastructure/resources needed to support the free users is not a bad thing - especially when you give those users an option to opt-out.
You make it sound like their goal is to do bad things. That's not true. Corporations are not good or evil, they are amoral. They don't care if what they are doing is good or bad - it just matters if they make money.
What exactly would that entail?
For me, the issue isn't as much that they are forcing the data collection (on some/free people, to be clear).
I have issues with the way they are spending their development money, that I give them for the product. I don't care about the AI hype slop, that apparently can't even get good results (which they outright admit in the blogpost), instead of actually making the core features of the editor better. Everyone knows at this point it's a hype bubble that will never be usable, and they are grasping at straws.
I don't want to pay 200$ a year only for them to add a dumb chatbot and data collection into my IDE, or make the code completion dumber and random instead of actually being deterministic. So I don't, canceled my subscription and I'm sticking to the perpetual license while slowly switching to nvim. But I can still make fun of them about it. I have been recommending JetBrains products for most of my life, and they have disappointed me with the direction they are going, so I'll make sure to un-recommend it.
That's fair, but that's just a service quality complaint. It doesn't sound to me like you are claiming they are doing "a bad thing", as a moral value judgement.
The right thing is to make it opt-in for everyone, simple as that. The entire controversy goes away immediately if they do. If they really believe it's a good value proposition for their users, and want to avoid collecting data from people who didn't actually want to give it, they should have faith that their users will agree and affirmatively check the box.
If free users are really such a drain on them, why have they been offering a free version for so long before it became a conduit to that sweet, sweet data? Because it isn't a drain, it's a win-win. They want people using their IDE, even for free, they don't get money from it but they get market share, broad familiarity with their tool amongst software engineers, a larger user base that can support each other on third party sites and provide free advertising, and more.
How is that the right thing? I'm directly challenging this claim.
All I said was that free users cost them money, so it's reasonable for them to try to recover those costs. I never claimed that free users are a drain on them, so I won't even respond to the rest of your comment.
Opt out means "we will be doing this, without permission, unless you tell us not to" and opt in means "if you give us permission we will do this." Codebases can contain important and sensitive information, and sending it off to some server to be shoved into an LLM is something that should be done with care. Getting affirmative consent is the bare minimum.
I disagree about what the bare minimum is. It's not uninformed. They tell you about it, and tell you you can opt out. I don't really see how that would be them doing it without permission.
Why isn't "it's informed and you can just opt out" good enough for paid users? They could've developed a single system instead of two if that's a sufficient standard of care for users' data.
It is good enough. I wouldn't have cared if they did make paid users opt out. I think it's a courtesy to their paid users, not an attack on their free users, that they allow paid users to opt in instead of opting out.
Also, there's no way they developed a whole separate system for this. It's likely a single line boolean check.