Intellij IDEA goes Open Source
by Wolfram Saringer (2009-10-16)
last change: 2009-10-16
Quite a bold move by Jetbrains, the people behind what I consider to be the best Java IDE by far: starting with Version 9
(soon to be released) they will split into two version, IDEA Community Edition and Ultimate Edition. While the latter remains
a commercial offer, primarily targeting J2EE devlopers, the former will be published under the Apache 2.0 license.
One might suspect the free offer to be so crippled that it will just draw potential customers to IDEA and then convert them
to commercial licenses. This seems not to be the case: while having a clear focus on J2SE, the Community Edition retains all
the features that made IDEA a great offer for J2SE developers (even the powerful refactoring capabilities seem to be intact)
while gaining additional support features for Groovy and Scala development.
I'm really looking forward to a greatly expanded IDEA audience. Many of those choosing Eclipse just because it is free now
can reconsider their choice...