But if you wanted to use a tool to format the code easily to meet a certain coding standard, the code is still usable by others, so it is OK.
For instance suppose you were tasked to develop some reports and your company has SQL Server which has its own reporting tool, but you personally prefer Crystal Reports so you use your personal copy of it to develop the reports. You also should not be using such a tool without the knowledge and agreement of your company. However, if the code cannot be maintained except through using this tool, then you really need to have a corporate license that can move easily to another person when you are no longer there. If the product is something that makes your work easier but does not affect the ability of others in your company to maintain the same code, a personal license may be a good idea provided your company has no problem with you having it on your work computer (some companies especially ones with a large IT team tend to be very picky about what can be put on a computer for "security" reasons.) With IntelliJ IDEA, all I had to do was copy the license file to bin/idea.license of the IntelliJ installation directory, and it picked up the license without each user having to have a license.
In other words the impact on the company of you choosing to have a personal license. We have a classroom license for WebStorm and I'd like to install it for all users on our computer lab systems so that all of our students can use it. Free educational JetBrains license is now a part of GitHub Student Developer Pack. I am going to address not the legal issue but whether it is a good idea at all. Inside any app of IntelliJ, click on Help > Register > Remove license. That will allow you and only you to use it on any number of computers (but only on one computer at a time, if memory serves (it's been a few years since I read the fine print, and that specific wasn't relevant to me at the time as I only had one computer per location). With a corporate license you could get a contractor or intern to take over for 6 months and reuse that license.Īs you're buying yourself for use at work (and probably at home as well) you'd purchase a personal license. If one of them is on a 6 months long sabatical, there will thus be only 9 licenses in use as a maximum. Were one of them to leave the company, that license becomes useless (though they might have a means to get the license transfered to another person, you'd have to contact Jetbrains about that).
If however you buy 10 personal licenses, only the 10 specific people who are mentioned can ever use the product. What that means inside a company is that if you buy a corporate license for 10 users, any 10 people can use the product at any given time.
The personal license is linked to a specific person. For Jetbrains, the corporate license is a license that's not linked to an individual.