IntelliJ Goes Open Source

by Scott Delap on Oct 15, 2009 |

After years of innovation as a commercial production in an ever increasing open source environment, IntelliJ IDEA has moved towards open source. From the press release:

...Starting with the upcoming version 9.0, IntelliJ IDEA will be offered in two editions: Community Edition, free and open-source, and Ultimate Edition, which until today has been referred to as simply IntelliJ IDEA.
The greatest news is that introduction of the Community Edition removes the only barrier to a wider use of IntelliJ IDEA for pure Java development — its price tag. This edition is not only free, but — and this is especially important – is fully open-sourced.

“We've always been open to the community — with our public Early Access Program (EAP), issue trackers, forums, and so on. This made for a tight and direct feedback loop with our users, even at a time when this wasn’t a widely accepted practice in the industry. Since then, we've supported hundreds of open-source projects with free product licenses, contributed code to various open-source projects like Groovy and Scala, and developed several open-sourced IntelliJ IDEA plugins ourselves,” said Sergey Dmitriev, JetBrains CEO. “So, you can see how offering the IntelliJ IDEA experience for free, through an open-source license, goes hand in hand with our focus on the community. Open source has become the mainstream, and we continue to embrace it as an exciting challenge. In brief, we're not changing direction — we're moving forward.”

The brand new Community Edition is built on the IntelliJ Platform and includes its sources. JetBrains has made it as easy as possible to access and use the source code of the Community Edition and the IntelliJ Platform, by applying the democratic Apache 2.0 license to both of them...

In addition to the community edition Jetbrains will continue to offer the commercial Ultimate Edition of IntelliJ. This version includes support for features such as Android, GWT, Flex, JEE and OSGi. InfoQ will provide more community reaction when it becomes available.

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Community comments

No HTML? by Ronald Miura Posted

feature set by Mantas Kanaporis Posted

Indeed by leo de blaauw Posted

Re: Indeed by Matt Passell Posted

Re: Indeed by Eirik Maus Posted

Intellij commercial by Frode Johansen Posted

Crippleware to the extreme by Stephen Starkey Posted

Good move by Przemyslaw Pokrywka Posted

No SQL, Html, CSS, JavaScript editor, what's mean? by haidong wang Posted

no support for any appserver by krishna bomma Posted

No HTML? by Ronald Miura

Without HTML editing support and minimal integration to app servers, an IDE is almost irrelevant nowadays...

www.jetbrains.com/idea/nextversion/editions_com...

feature set by Mantas Kanaporis

no full support for HTML and CSS in free edition. not to mention other features. yet, adds spell checker and OSGi! can't even build a trivial web app to feel the full flow in the IDE. very strange positioning..

Indeed by leo de blaauw

Hmm in itselves a great move, but the 'free' version is too cripled in my book to be even somewhat usefull for day to day development. Offcourse the open-source community is free to develop their own extensions and plugins to fill this void, thing is then it would move away from the 'standard' plugins provided by jetbrains wich might not be such a good idea.. but oh well. Conclusion useless for me...

Crippleware to the extreme by Stephen Starkey

I've been an IntelliJ owner for years, and intend to be so for the future, but I can't imagine this Community Edition is going to do them any good. If pushing adoption is the key, then they need basic framework support and all the refactoring support (including the code duplication detection). I can't sell this to my friends who use NetBeans as a stepping stone -- all we do is web development!

Now, to be fair, the lack of HTML/CSS is only in refactorings, etc. I'm hoping they leave basic syntax highlighting, ctrl+click support for navigating to CSS classes, etc. If that stuff is out, too, I definitely can't see anyone I know wanting to use it.

Re: Indeed by Matt Passell

Yeah... :( I might try it again to see where their excellent Groovy support has gotten, but the fact that the free version doesn't include their Grails features will be a big turn off for me and many others.

--Matt
The Software Grove

Good move by Przemyslaw Pokrywka

Finally I will be able to use the best IDE in the world. Up until now, the price tag was a real barrier to me. I'm not missing the lacking features of Ultimate version, because I don't know them... But I really appreciate the possibility to try out the Scala support for free.

No SQL, Html, CSS, JavaScript editor, what's mean? by haidong wang

want Html, css, JavaScript , SQL editors. Tomcat or Jetty integration is not so important.

no support for any appserver by krishna bomma

No support for any app server or at least tomcat. I am not sure how this community edition is good for developer community?

Re: Indeed by Eirik Maus

"...too cripled...for day to day development".

Sounds like you are a prime target for the commercial version. Remember: no paying customers - no IDE, not even the free version.

- eirik
(happy customer for many years)

Intellij commercial by Frode Johansen

I've been using Eclipse the last 7 years or so, but I decided to try out the new 'IntelliJ Community edition' yesterday.

It's got all the basic functionality (Spring,groovy,clojure and jetty (and debug) if you use jetty:run) but I miss support for JSF/Facelets/Richfaces.

I also download the trial (30 day) version, and I must say.... there is a difference !!
Considering swithing to IntelliJ but Eclipse is working just fine, so....and it's free :-)