Eight months after announcing its public preview, JetBrains has officially released RustRover, a dedicated IDE for Rust development. The new release brings many bug fixes and introduces a new licensing model that includes a free plan for non-commercial use.
Since it became early available last September, RustRover has gone through several iterations aimed at making it more stable, performant, and feature-complete.
Besides this, the most significant part of the announcement is the introduction of a new free license for individual, non-commercial use:
If you are an individual wanting to use RustRover for non-commercial purposes, you can use the IDE for free. However, if you’re planning on using RustRover for commercial purposes, you need to purchase a license, as with our other products.
JetBrains will assign free licenses based on the honor system, although they reserve the right to use a stricter approach later on. The borderline between commercial and non-commercial use may be tricky to define, and JetBrains says you will need a paid license if you use RustRover "to obtain direct or indirect commercial advantage or monetary compensation". This includes the creation of content or educational material which is not made freely available. A commercial license is also required if you work on an open-source project as part of your day job, for consultancy or other paid services.
Contrary to other JetBrains IDEs, RustRover does not come with a dedicated subscription option. To use RustRover in a commercial setting, developers will need to buy an individual All Products Pack subscription, which includes 12 IDEs and additional tools and profilers.
It is worth remarking that using a non-commercial license for JetBrains IDEs means you cannot disable statistical data collection. According to JetBrains, though, stat collection is completely anonymous and does not allow user tracking, which should make it GDPR-compliant.
As a final note, when JetBrains announced RustRover, it also deprecated the community Rust plugin for its IDEs, a decision that raised some criticism. It turns out, though, that a Rust plugin is still available, only in a closed-source form. This is the same component that is used in RustRover and is compatible with IntelliJ and CLion, which makes it possible to get Rust language support in those IDEs, too.