It's not a misapprehension: selling tools to tool-makers requires that you walk a very fine line. A lot of closed-source tools have pissed off developers enough to be replaced by usually-superior open-source versions, e.g. Git replacing BitKeeper because kernel developers were not happy with BK.
Outside of very specialized tools, open source tools tend to attract more contributors and quickly overtake incumbents (see compilers). JetBrains is one of the few companies that bucks the trend, and one I gladly give money to regardless of my increasing VSCode usage.
Had Dropbox been marketed at developers only, it would have been a spectacular failure in a world where inotify, rsync, cron and scp already existed.
> JetBrains is one of the few companies that bucks the trend, and one I gladly give money to regardless of my increasing VSCode usage.
Large parts of IntelliJ are open-source as well, and sometimes they do get used in other open-source editors. Afaict they're pretty good citizens in terms of F/OSS.
Outside of very specialized tools, open source tools tend to attract more contributors and quickly overtake incumbents (see compilers). JetBrains is one of the few companies that bucks the trend, and one I gladly give money to regardless of my increasing VSCode usage.
Had Dropbox been marketed at developers only, it would have been a spectacular failure in a world where inotify, rsync, cron and scp already existed.