Alright, I’ll just put my ulterior motive out in the open - I really like JetBrains IDEs, and I have one particular paid plugin that would really help me at my work. I can’t afford it though, and want it for free, and this is the complicated, may-end-up-helping-everyone way I’ve thought of to do that.
So, with that out of the way:
Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve probably heard of JetBrains and their coding tools (IntelliJ IDEA, PyCharm, CLion, etc.) I’ve used these before and they are really good as far as IDEs go, and while IDEs may not be everyone’s cup of tea, they’re certainly my cup of tea and I bet there are plenty of other Ubuntu devs who would benefit from having a decent IDE for free.
IntelliJ IDEA Community Edition is really good, but it has some limitations as far as what files it can work with, its collaborative coding features can’t be used for as long in the free version (they’re time-limited), and there are some neat plugins like BashSupportPro that can be used with Community Edition but that still need to be paid for separately. I assume most of us here aren’t able to blow a few hundred dollars a year on a suite of IDEs, so it might be useful to have free access to the “fancy” (paid) versions of the tools and plugins.
IntelliJ has a program called Developer Recognition that provides free access to their IDEs and (at least some of) their paid plugins to prevalent developers in certain communities (such as Microsoft MVPs and Java Champions). I’m looking at this and thinking “wouldn’t Ubuntu MOTUs fit here too?” Currently Ubuntu MOTUs are not in this list… but it seems like we fit the same general idea they’re going for.
What does the rest of the community think about potentially asking JetBrains if they’d be interested in adding Ubuntu MOTUs to the Developer Recognition program? It would provide good incentive for developers who don’t have MOTU status yet to gain MOTU status, it would provide those who are MOTUs with fancy new development tools, and it would probably end up providing JetBrains with advertising, which may benefit their business. And I’d get my BashSupportPro for free and be able to do better work as a volunteer MOTU (and have an easier time at my workplace). 