Data Is More Valuable Than Money: JetBrains Changes Licenses on Code From Real Projects

Major players are increasingly understanding that the gold of the 21st century is not oil or subscriptions, but data. And JetBrains demonstrates this particularly clearly. The company is willing to forgo quick profits and give away licenses for free — just to gain access to the unique 'fuel' for its AI models.

Most LLMs are trained on public datasets that are far from real-world work scenarios. This leads to 'hallucinations' and errors on complex projects. JetBrains wants to fix this and collect real signals — code editing history, terminal commands, AI queries, and responses.

What they came up with:

• Instead of almost $1000 for an annual corporate All Products Pack subscription (access to all IDEs), companies can get it for free.
• The price: allow JetBrains to collect work data — code snippets, terminal commands, editing history, and AI queries.
• This data will be used to train JetBrains' own language models.
• The data collection also applies to academic and open-source licenses (with an option to opt out in the settings).
• JetBrains promises that data will be stored in compliance with GDPR, with no third-party access.

In fact, JetBrains is giving away licenses for free today to have an advantage in the race for AI tools tomorrow.

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