I’d need to use DBeaver Pro for the work I do - but they don’t offer perpetual licensing - which is a deal-killer for me (EDIT: I originally incorrectly claimed they didn’t support offline-installs, but apparently they do - but only for installs with a 12-month built-in timebomb: https://dbeaver.com/license-types/ )
It says “No monthly subscription” which really just means “Annual subscription” instead: https://dbeaver.com/edition/
It’s not that I don’t think it’s worth $500/yr - I’d actually be happy to pay $1000 or more - but I absolutely need a pain+hassle-free UX that I can drag around air-gapped networks - and install on a legacy Windows 2003 VM running an ancient build of Sybase and then forget about it for 3-5 years, but be able to RDP-in and know that my DB tooling is still going to be there, unchanged, reliable and dependable.
…whereas subscription desktop software with deeply integrated online accounts and activation and mandatory updates every few weeks (and the occasional account system outage, which ruins everything (looking at you, GitKraken) really really does not work well in those kinds (…my kinds) of environment.
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SaaS as a business-model for online services is fine; great, even; and I’m not even opposed to it for desktop software provided that it delivers more value and overall UX quality compared to how-we-did-things-before - but SaaS companies don’t have a solution to the problem of ultra-long-life’d, ultra-dependable, server/system administration tooling.
Can you imagine if Bash or Zsh - or phpMyAdmin - or systemd had to phone-home for a new OAuth access-token every month?
> What feature do you need that isn't in the open source version?
ODBC support, Cassandra, Redis, and Azure (Table) Storage support, and support for the kinds of obsolete RDBMS and "4GL" you see in large enterprise and small mom-and-pop backrooms (Progress, Clipper, AdvantageDB, ElevateDB, etc). And SQL script debugging for Postgres.
Currently I have separate tools/clients/IDEs for all the different data systems I target (e.g. SSMS, MySQL Workbench, Azure Storage Explorer, Azure Data Studio, Excel PowerQuery, LinqPad for .NET Framework 4.x for both x86 and x64 because ODBC and OLE-DB are like that); while I have a modest set of portable-ish VM images of obsolete Windows OS instances where I can run MS Access 2003 or some Clipper derivative. I'm also still running Firebird and even FoxPro 9 in another VM somewhere.
...so yes, having a single tool which handles 85% of my tasks without needing to juggle VMs and multiple bloated Electron apps together would be an improvement for me and worth me paying money for.
> Why not fork it and implement that feature, and then use that?
"Fork it" is not a reasonable suggestion considering the amount of work involved (see above).
> If you don't want to deal with a company trying to extract profit from you, use the open source version. That's the way to ensure your own freedom
As I said, I'm perfectly fine with me throwing money at DBeaver. I'm just expressing my frustration with DBeaver that I think they're being callous by not offering perpetual offline licenses for Dbeaver Pro, for any amount of money. The fact they used to[1] but don't anymore suggests they were getting disappointing return business from deep-pocketed "enterprise" customers, but I'm disappointed that their solution to this problem of theirs means leaving my money on the table because now they don't have any product licenses that I can work with.
Your reasons are valid and make complete sense to me. I wonder if you could write to them and explain your use case and offer to pay for a perpetual license? No idea if it'll work, but worth a shot maybe?
If you try this, do update and let us know what they say.
Toad by Quest Software was the original SQL GUI development tool, and developed the basic style that most of these apps use today. I have senior developers who refuse to consider anything else, and cling to unsupported versions of Toad.
Oracle SQL Developer does not support SQLite, but the design is their "internal Toad-killer," and reimplements Toad in Java. It does accept JDBC drivers for 3rd-party databases (but not SQLite so far).
Works with more than just SQLite.