I think most of us value our freedom more.

Most people don't think of it in terms of freedom, but freedom it is. With proprietary software:

- You don't know when it will disappear or be discontinued. Even your paid-for existing version stops working when the activation servers go down.

- You might be forced into an "upgrade" which breaks something you rely on

- That's not to mention issues like being able to fix bugs yourself, extend it, or understand it. I don't do this often directly, but something like being able to understand a file format my data is in or similar is common

I don't mind paying for things, but things need to be a lot better on other axes before this one becomes the most important.

My experience is that:

- Things I did decades ago are sometimes useful. Nearly 100% of the time, if this was in a proprietary system, it's gone or unusable. My LaTeX files still work.

- Companies switch between growth mode and cash cow mode. When this happens, the cost to me is almost always higher than the initial benefit over free.

- Which is better on other axes goes back-and-forth. An investment I make into a tool now doesn't mean it will be the leading tool in five years.

- Those sorts of long-term considerations are almost always more important than short-term technical stuff.

jefftime

To piggyback off this, another reason that I think software freedom is valuable is community support. Things like LSPs, syntax highlighters, and that sort of support doesn't have to wait on JetBrains to integrate it into their IDE. I think there is real value to the community being able to hack on a tool and not being at the whim of a single developer's priorities

dannymi

I just adapted the intellij-rust plugin from https://github.com/intellij-rust/intellij-rust to syntax highlight Rust slightly better. It works just fine, and I had to coordinate with nobody. Just edit file, build plugin, install plugin to the IDE (using the menu in the GUI interface). That's it.

Most of the stuff of Jetbrains is open source (under Apache Software License) and is available on github.

I know what you mean though: I would never again use a closed-source IDE, or a language with closed-source standard library. Microsoft Visual Studio made me learn that, decades ago.