IntelliJ IDEA goes Open-Source!
Yesterday (October 15th, 2009) IntelliJ announced open-sourcing most of its IDEA editor under Apache 2.0 license.
Inevitable for growth
At some perspective this has been an inevitable move — code editors have turned into big platforms. They are used for much more than developing pure text-based artifacts. To remain competitive you need to allow the maximum level of integration, openness and visibility. Which becomes impossible without open-sourcing all the core components. Controversially, using a permissive license (ASL, BSD, EPL, LGPL, not GPL) can turn your business into a charity organization.
Commercial offering
IDEA Platform plus Java, Groovy and Scala support are all open-sourced. It looks like IntelliJ is retaining some of the revenue stream by keeping Java EE stack closed-source, calling it IDEA Ultimate and offering it as a commercial product.
The Importance of Java Enterprise (JEE) Tooling
I think IntelliJ decision about keeping EE as a separate commercial product is a very important indicator for the whole IDE marketplace and particularly for Eclipse. Much to my surprise, at the last Eclipse members meeting Q3 call there were some very interesting download stats reported. Eclipse Galileo IDE for JEE gets 41% of the downloads! While Classic and Java combined were 34%! (Off-topic but rcp/plugin edition was 2%).
This 41% of JEE downloads does not include 3rd party distribution providers, many application server vendors have their own bundles with a pre-configured settings (for example GlassFish Tools Eclipse Bundle).
Indication for a better future
IntelliJ move and Eclipse Galileo JEE download clearly demonstrate how important is a good tooling support for Java Enterprise development.
IntelliJ move can also be a sign for Eclipse that there is now a friendly competitor who has put their bet on outperforming current Eclipse JEE feature-set with a commercial offering.
I have no experience with the IntelliJ JEE offering, is it better than the JEE tooling from Netbeans and Eclipse?
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Wow, I didn’t know Eclipse JEE is that popular.
Comment by Ivar Meikas — October 16, 2009 @ 1:22 pm
IntelliJ IDEA is popular. It is used especially by advanced users who enjoy the fantastic functionality the IDE offers.
Developing JEE with IntelliJ IDEA is excellent. That a broader community can now benefit from the free Community Edition writing Swing, Groovy, Scala, .. is a very nice move.
Every time I’m lost in Eclipse plugin hell, I wish they would find a way to cope with the complexity.
Comment by Michael Hüttermann — October 16, 2009 @ 6:20 pm
Yet, I just found out that open source version does not include Structural Search — and this is probably one of the very fundamental features that is the main IDEA selling factor for any developer. too bad. See http://www.jetbrains.com/idea/nextversion/editions_comparison_matrix.html?utm_source=IDEA_BLOG&utm_media=Anouncement&utm_campaign=IDEA9_CE for in-depth comparison.
Comment by AhtiK — October 16, 2009 @ 6:32 pm
IDEA support for JEE is awesome. I’d suggest to give it a try – you can compare then
Comment by Anton — October 18, 2009 @ 2:30 am