IntelliJ IDEA Open Sourced
October 15th, 2009 by Egor MalyshevI believe you’ll like this announcement — IntelliJ IDEA has just gone open-source! Check out the press release as well as the new jetbrains.org community site for the details. We all will soon get a lot of new friends and colleagues in our IntelliJ IDEA community!
Starting with the upcoming version 9.0, IntelliJ IDEA will be offered in two editions: Community Edition and Ultimate Edition. The Community Edition focuses on Java SE technologies, Groovy and Scala development. It’s free of charge and open-sourced under the Apache 2.0 license. The Ultimate edition with full Java EE technology stack remains our standard commercial offering. See the feature comparison matrix for the differences.
Briefly, in the free Community Edition you’ll get all the Java code support — various refactorings and code inspections, coding assistance; debugging, TestNG and JUnit testing; CVS, Subversion and Git support; Ant and Maven build integration; and Groovy and Scala support (through a separate plugin). To learn more and download the Public Preview of IntelliJ IDEA 9 Community Edition, please visit the IntelliJ IDEA Community Edition site.
The IntelliJ platform, the common foundation for all our IDEs (IDEA, RubyMine, WebIDE or MPS), is being open-sourced under the APL 2.0, too.
You’ll find all the relevant information on how to participate and benefit at JetBrains.org. Check out the FAQ if you have additional questions.
Tags: community edition, maia, open source
October 15th, 2009 at 11:50 am
Great news!
October 15th, 2009 at 11:51 am
Wow, that’s great news - thanks IntelliJ IDEA team! You are the best!
October 15th, 2009 at 12:00 pm
Woot!
I’m currently in the process of switching to IDEA, so this comes just in time.
October 15th, 2009 at 12:00 pm
Congrats guys! This is a very big step for you.
October 15th, 2009 at 12:34 pm
Fantastic!
I must say though, as a guy who just bought a license a week ago, if the community edition wasn’t missing features I really need, I’d probably be livid! But since I need ultimate edition anyway for the Java EE stuff, I’m alright with this
October 15th, 2009 at 12:45 pm
Well done!
October 15th, 2009 at 1:00 pm
This is fantastic. I’ll still be purchasing the ultimate edition but this is great news for the open source community.
October 15th, 2009 at 1:03 pm
Great news and it largely takes out the final issue I often have convincing people to try IDEA in that it would cost them money. Looking forward to swaying a lot more people in the IntelliJ camp.
October 15th, 2009 at 1:28 pm
I love idea, but I have some trouble turning my co-workers on to it, since it costs (sadly). I hope this inspires more people to buy it. It’s a great product & I would love to see it be (more) successful in the marketplace.
Beth
October 15th, 2009 at 1:28 pm
This is so awesome. Thankyou.
October 15th, 2009 at 1:46 pm
Wow!
October 15th, 2009 at 1:50 pm
Sweet,… Should have a longtime ago….
October 15th, 2009 at 2:23 pm
Yay! This is the best thanksgiving gift ever!
October 15th, 2009 at 2:37 pm
Really great news.
An awesome IDE for Java SE for free =D
October 15th, 2009 at 2:38 pm
Wow, this is awesome!! I have always wanted a free edition of IntelliJ IDEA.
October 15th, 2009 at 2:43 pm
Great step by IDEA, can’t wait to get Intellij 9.
Matt: that’s what they call a “License Purchase FAIL”
October 15th, 2009 at 2:48 pm
Wow!
I don’t need the Community Edition but this is very nice news.
October 15th, 2009 at 2:50 pm
And… finally! Great job jetbrains, good job!
October 15th, 2009 at 2:53 pm
That’s really exciting news. I’ve been a hardcore Java developer for many years, left Java for a few years and then came back.
IntelliJ is still *the* best Java IDE - hopefully this will help it keep that position.
Extra bonus points to you for putting it under Git. This will completely blow your mind with respect to the amount of contributions you’ll get back from the community. Now all you need is to reorganise yourself and form team-coordinators for contributions in different areas (GUI, Language support, core libraries and so on) - so that you can efficiently quality-check and merge in contributions in a scalable manner (Like Linux). -But I guess you already more or less have that kind of structure.
One question: Does IntelliJ have a “visionary” product owner kind of person, or is it more of a team-concensus based product? That always puzzled me.
BTW, your reCAPTCHA really sucks. I had to try 10 times.
Thanks again,
Aslak
October 15th, 2009 at 2:56 pm
Err - sorry about the triple posting. I got CAPTCHA error messages for each submit, so I reposted. I’ll scroll up and check next time.
October 15th, 2009 at 2:57 pm
Great news!
October 15th, 2009 at 3:11 pm
This is absolutely awesome guys!
October 15th, 2009 at 3:14 pm
Super cool,
i’ve been using IDEA since 2001.
Way to go Jetbrains
October 15th, 2009 at 3:14 pm
Chaps & Chapesses,
You have always lead the way in what it is to make a seriously productive IDE. It’s no mistake that you bought the same productivity to the .NET world either.
Your kindness in OS’ing IntelliJ simply illustrates your commitment to building not good, but great software.
Hats off to you all.
A job well done.
Ben.
October 15th, 2009 at 3:20 pm
I can’t wait to see some of IntelliJ’s features rolled into Eclipse!
October 15th, 2009 at 3:23 pm
Finally! Looking forward to a Ruby implementation
October 15th, 2009 at 3:33 pm
Will this effect the free licences for the full product (ultimate IDEA) that you’ve handed out to members of worthy open source projects in the past? Will they now be limited to the community edition instead?
Just wondering..
October 15th, 2009 at 3:34 pm
This is fantastic news! Where can I find the Plugin SDK? I have a plugin which I wrote for IDEA 7 that I would like to port to IDEA 9.
October 15th, 2009 at 4:05 pm
спасибо большое, теперь лабораторные работы буду писать IDEA, а не в этом тормозном Eclipse
October 15th, 2009 at 4:34 pm
I think that the community edition will be great for universities and trade schools teaching Java or languages for the JVM e.g. Groovy. For most enterprise Java developers and architects, the announcement makes no difference. I for one am an IDEA user but need the full-blown features e.g. Grails, Hibernate, JPA, Spring, web services, UML, web-containers (Tomcat, Jetty), etc.
The motive behind open-source the core part of IDEA is admirable and I definitely tip my hat to JetBrains for doing that. I also highly recommend that JetBrains work hard to promote the open-source version of IDEA in schools and universities because Java is widespread in many IS departments.
I for one am a pragmatist and am willing to pay the $250 that JetBrains wants for an individual license for funding development of IDEA. Having used Eclipse which is totally open-source, I totally realize how unsuitable it is for enterprise development. The hassles that I am able to overcome with IDEA as well as the beautiful UML diagrams it generates are well worth the price.
October 15th, 2009 at 4:36 pm
Completely awesome news! IDEA has rocked my Java world for a long time.
Thank you for doing this!
Jim
October 15th, 2009 at 4:38 pm
Much like netbeans 5.5 with everything elsewhere. It’s still behind it as far as i can see. Too much icons, menus, toolbars everywhere. not what I would call friendly at first sight.
Anyway, it’s a good thing to have another open source competitor.
October 15th, 2009 at 4:45 pm
Gordon: Now that the source is available, a separate SDK download no longer makes much sense. Please refer to http://www.jetbrains.org/display/IJOS/Writing+Plug-ins for more information.
October 15th, 2009 at 4:57 pm
I really hope this works for you: you deserve to be successful. I’ve been an IntelliJ user for years since Jacek Ambrosiak convinced me in the corridor at a conference, and I’ve been happy to pay for it - it’s cheaper than my laptop, and worth far more. As it happens, I don’t think I need any of the features that won’t be in the community edition. I’ve been doing consultancy recently with a company that has Eclipse installed everywhere, and I’m amazed how much better IntelliJ is (and that’s not just familiarity, the people there would all prefer to have IntelliJ if they were allowed to.)
October 15th, 2009 at 5:12 pm
grails
October 15th, 2009 at 6:15 pm
This is the best news I v heard around these years, indeed!
October 15th, 2009 at 6:22 pm
Superb news. I’ve been evangelising IntelliJ for a long time, but the cost has been the barrier in each and every case - this announcement removes that problem.
RIP Eclipse
October 15th, 2009 at 6:29 pm
Wohoo! Surely today is not April 1st?
October 15th, 2009 at 6:48 pm
Congrats! I’ll be keeping my paid license (and upgrading when Maia is finished) though. Hopefully this will bring more people to IntelliJ IDEA.
Also, off topic, I like the website redesign!
October 15th, 2009 at 7:00 pm
Congratulations! This represents an impressive achievement for the JetBrains team, and a great day for the extended Java community.
October 15th, 2009 at 7:10 pm
woo.. it’s a great news, we get another choice of Java IDE.
October 15th, 2009 at 7:15 pm
Fantastic! So when will you be open sourcing Resharper?
October 15th, 2009 at 7:31 pm
now eclipse IDE is doomed. It’s JSP support is not much better than syntax, and freemarker support is pain.
Now that people will try to use it first for plain Java - they will fall in love and become dedicated customers. You just gave me another reason to buy a license as soon as my current project ends (you should really fix your eclipse import, that really keeps me off).
Anyhow - great news!
October 15th, 2009 at 8:20 pm
Wow it’s cool and thanks to JetBrains team to make it happen
October 15th, 2009 at 8:24 pm
But no Javascript and CSS support? C’mon! This makes the open source edition pretty lame for such a basic feature.
October 15th, 2009 at 8:37 pm
congratulations!!!
now I will definetely give it a try… can’t quite get used to netbeans nor eclipse…
October 15th, 2009 at 8:37 pm
Yole: Thanks for the pointer!
October 15th, 2009 at 10:45 pm
Can I developed grails apps with IntelliJ CE ?
it support groovy but in the comparison matrix I saw that Grails was not supported.
I am using VIM at the moment
October 15th, 2009 at 10:55 pm
This is awful news, absolutely terrible move…. for Eclipse
and possibly for consultants, who uses Eclipse so that a job takes longer time == more income.
I think it makes perfect sense to separate the Core from the EE, and I assume that the previous OSS license will disappear as a result, and since I have been working on many OSS projects, we extremely seldom uses anything beyond the “standard install” (in 8.x) and if that is roughly the new Community Edition, then I am totally cool with this, and I think it will be so much easier to get friends and colleagues to start using it.
October 15th, 2009 at 11:06 pm
Congrats!!! i’ve been looking up to this
October 15th, 2009 at 11:11 pm
Great news!
October 15th, 2009 at 11:20 pm
What does this mean?
10/15/09 8:56:51 PM [0x0-0x10f10f].com.jetbrains.intellij[8225] [JavaAppLauncher Warning] Java application launched from PPC or bad stub. Relaunching in 32-bit, and tagging sub-processes to prefer 32-bit with $JAVA_ARCH=i386.
10/15/09 8:56:51 PM [0x0-0x10f10f].com.jetbrains.intellij[8225] [JavaAppLauncher Error] This process is [i386] and was re-exec’d from [i386], but for some reason we are trying re-exec to [].
10/15/09 8:56:51 PM [0x0-0x10f10f].com.jetbrains.intellij[8225] [JavaAppLauncher Error] unable to find a version of Java to launch
October 15th, 2009 at 11:29 pm
Thanks JetBrains! Now can I convince you to do the same for TeamCity?
October 15th, 2009 at 11:36 pm
Whoa! Should we read this as good news or bad news? Isn’t a large chunk of installations being used for just Java? How will you keep the money coming?
All the best! I love IntelliJ.
Ashwin.
October 16th, 2009 at 12:28 am
Will this allow MPS to become completely open source?
October 16th, 2009 at 12:35 am
Wuuhuu ! I am very happy to hear this news. Thank you.
October 16th, 2009 at 1:03 am
This is a great news. You created amazing IDE and make it available for free. Thank you!
October 16th, 2009 at 1:05 am
Brett: Yes, MPS is now completely open-source.
October 16th, 2009 at 1:13 am
Douglas: We don’t have any plans to open-source TeamCity. The existing licensing model ensures that there’s no price barrier to adopting it, and the plugin architecture allows the users to customize and extend TeamCity.
Adwin: You can develop Grails applications with the Community Edition (and you’ll certainly have more features than in vim), but you won’t have any Grails specific IntelliJ features (such as the Grails project view, navigation bars, code insight support etc.)
Alan: Unfortunately the initial Community Edition build for the Mac only works on Snow Leopard. We’ll release a fixed build today.
October 16th, 2009 at 1:35 am
That is exceptional news. Thank you to all involved
October 16th, 2009 at 2:43 am
Awesome !!!!!
October 16th, 2009 at 2:49 am
I believe that this movement will save future of JetBrains to its rivals. As a IDEA developer since 3.x, I can simply say that NetBeans is also very mature and good now and has been threatening IDEA in this field especially in terms of financial perspective. There is no doubt about IDEA will be better than ever.
October 16th, 2009 at 3:11 am
Great news and will enable great developers to become greater. Thanks!
But, why not including Ruby support?
Jetbrains: I’m a fan since the start of IntelliJ, keep up the very great work!
October 16th, 2009 at 3:15 am
Richard Osbaldeston, let me put it short and simple — no they won’t be
October 16th, 2009 at 3:15 am
I love it, excellent news!
October 16th, 2009 at 3:30 am
While I truly hope this will help spreading IntelliJ more, I wonder how many people can actually use this version. All EE support (even simple web projects) is stripped out, which makes the Community Edition very limited useable in practice.
If Java developers would just get rid of the idea that software is supposed to be free… I’m also not sure if open sourcing will help any good. OS only works if the company is structured around this concept, otherwise it’s just overhead.
October 16th, 2009 at 3:38 am
Hi all, here are some answers to the questions - yes, MPS can be now fully open source, because the platform used under it is also open source.
As for Grails, currently it is only supported in Ultimate Edition.
As for how many people drive the vision of IDEA - it’s definitely not 1 person, it’s more of a team effort.
As for licenses given away to open source projects - open source projects can continue to use the IDEA licenses as they received them and I believe we will continue giving away free licenses of Ultimate Edition to open source projects if they need them and request them.
As for building plug-ins, see this page:
http://www.jetbrains.org/display/IJOS/Writing+Plug-ins
No plans to open source ReSharper right now.
October 16th, 2009 at 4:09 am
Looking at the number of features cut out of the free version, I have to ask, Why bother?
I love Intellij Idea. I think the full version blows eclipse away. But compare eclipse with the free version of Idea…..
October 16th, 2009 at 4:32 am
Great new.
Reading source code now, and I want to make some plugins for the community.
October 16th, 2009 at 5:46 am
weeeeeeee finally.
way to go, thank you!
a few important features are missing support in the community edition, but hey… its a first step
October 16th, 2009 at 6:09 am
Great news
In this file:
http://git.jetbrains.org/?p=idea/community.git;a=blob;f=java/java-impl/src/com/intellij/cyclicDependencies/ui/CyclicDependenciesPanel.java;h=8b0856484f3a03bc1d572f7299c90348c3556f73;hb=HEAD
line 64:
private final HashMap<PsiPackage, Set<List>> myDependencies;
should probably be
private final Map<PsiPackage, Set<List>> myDependencies;
It will be interesting to see how open sourcing evolves IntelliJ
October 16th, 2009 at 8:15 am
Thank you for your great works
October 16th, 2009 at 9:57 am
fantastic news - this gets around the most common argument (excuse) for using eclipse.
October 16th, 2009 at 10:17 am
Awesome news!!! I really hope you get the financial return you deserve, and I’m glad to see Groovy support listed as a Community Edition feature; I’ve been reading that Groovy support in IntelliJ is the best around, now I have the chance to try it.
October 16th, 2009 at 10:18 am
Initially I thought this was great news but I think there are just a few too many red X’s on the comparison page. I don’t begrudge you guys making money but what good is ‘comprehensive Groovy support’ if the IDE does not include the support for Grails?
October 16th, 2009 at 10:37 am
Awesome news
October 16th, 2009 at 10:37 am
Been an IDEA fan since the early days of intelli… simply “the best” IDE… this is certainly a really good news… good move jetbrains.
October 16th, 2009 at 10:40 am
I’m 110% with ‘confused’ above… the “community edition” has been so heavily lobotomized that it’s hard to see any Eclipse or NetBeans developer, no matter how disenchanted, from really taking it seriously, or even bothering to fire it up. JetBrains and the “community” are going to have to work really, really hard to make this seem anything more than a come-on for the full “Ultimate” version.
October 16th, 2009 at 11:05 am
My eyes lit up when I saw the heading on this, but looking at the comparison chart, well…
No app server support?
No framework support?
Oh boy, let’s build Hello World in this awesome IDE!
Ok, the less cynical side of me hopes that these features are eventually duplicated by the open source community, eclipsing the current feature set and freeing the on-staff developers to create a richer offering in the Ultimate Edition. This is actually a good move, as by the time that the open source edition catches up to the licensed version, the developers that *were* maintaining custom code can incorporate the open source features, then focus their attention on their own development efforts for a larger set of non-public features.
I’ve convinced myself. From within me now comes a mighty “yay”. YAY!
October 16th, 2009 at 1:02 pm
I have to wonder if this won’t hurt IDEA instead.
Given the lack of features in the Community Edition, I can’t see people switching from NetBeans or Eclipse. If nobody switches to the Community Edition there’s never a chance to upsell into the Ultimate Edition.
Alternatively, what’s to stop the Eclipse and NetBeans communities from scavaging the best parts of your Apache licensed codebase and locking their enhancements behind a more restrictive license?
You might do better to position the Community Edition against the RCP platforms provided by NetBeans and Eclipse.
I’m always glad to see more code open sourced. Good luck!
October 16th, 2009 at 1:23 pm
I don’t understand this edition. If the aim is to promote IDEA in universities, it should provide minimal support for JavaEE development - at least Tomcat support or probably some built-in container.
October 17th, 2009 at 5:43 am
I have same concerns about the usability of community edition. However it is a just one step to make more. In my opinion, community edition should have same features and be free to universities, non commercial projects.
October 18th, 2009 at 4:37 pm
Java world was waiting for this to happen for a long time, but anyway ‘better late than never’. I just wish standard edition had spring support.
Congratulations and thanks for this great gift to community
October 19th, 2009 at 6:24 am
Much expected and exciting announcement!
Keep going & growing!
October 20th, 2009 at 3:59 am
Why are so many people being so demanding in wanting the web / enterprise features from JetBrains for free while they themselves are unlikely to give away their software/support/time for free? Sometimes it seems that it’s just a step away from asking IntelliJ to actually do their homework/work for them if that’s possible. (Then perhaps the company should hire JetBrains instead. It will be more cost-effective.)
I wish the attitude ‘Let me seize this great opportunity to write my own plug-in / platform / next big thing!’ be more prevalent.
October 29th, 2009 at 12:15 am
I am a Java/J2EE/Groovy/Grails developer and I’d love to use my old buddy the IntelliJ IDEA back at home too, for my own personal training and continuous education. As of now, my focus is on Grails and I’m less than enthusiastically using Netbeans 6.7 for that purpose. Question: What kind of v9 upgrade am I supposed to get on top of my v8 license, the community or the ultimate edition, in exchange for purchasing right away a $249 IDEA v8 personal license? See the following announcement on the JB’s Licesing & Upgrade page @ http://www.jetbrains.com/idea/buy/index.jsp: \All IntelliJ IDEA 8 purchases made on or after October 1, 2009, qualify for a FREE upgrade to IntelliJ IDEA 9\. Sooooo… 4 which one, folks? Thanks!
October 29th, 2009 at 4:07 am
Petre, you’re getting an Ultimate Editon license when IntelliJ IDEA 9 is out if you’re going to purchase IntelliJ IDEA 8 now.
November 7th, 2009 at 7:54 am
so much awesomeness for freee!!
November 8th, 2009 at 1:38 am
what about j2ee !!!!!?
November 10th, 2009 at 10:03 am
The community edition looks like really useful, if it’s 1997 and you’ve just bought the first edition of Java Servlet Programming.
December 16th, 2009 at 10:36 am
But why???
March 17th, 2010 at 12:44 pm
how do you setup tomcat with this community IJ release ?
April 9th, 2010 at 2:14 am
I am new to intel IDE .Can any help how to import and export Project from Intelj and also how to work with the IDE
July 28th, 2010 at 12:42 pm
Can someone tell my why IntelliJ is worth $250 more than Eclipse v3.6?
August 17th, 2010 at 2:56 am
I am using IntelliJ for more than two years(starting 6.x) and I must say there are valid reasons to be considered as the best. This 9.x is one step ahead of all. Good luck.
August 18th, 2010 at 1:16 pm
@Ssundar,
Your response is pure emotional with no facts. Just because you ‘feel’ that way doesn’t make it so. If you had provided actual side by side comparisons supporting your opinion then I might have taken you seriously. But as it stands now you just come off as IntelliJ fanboy or maybe even a Jetbrains employee.
So does anyone else out there want to tell me why IntelliJ is worth $250 more than Eclipse v3.6?
December 18th, 2010 at 3:30 am
@Jeff,
I will try to answer that. US$250 is a lot of money yes, but… There’s always a but.
If you bash off people as fanboys or “maybe even a Jetbrains employee” it simply means that you could be a different fanboy yourself or just too stingy to fork out that much for an excellent IDE. Excellent in the way that it helps you to excel.
“To surpass someone or something; to be better or do better than someone or something; To be much better than others” - http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/excel
I “grew up” using Eclipse, so I didn’t really bother to try something else, although I explored Netbeans too. So when IntelliJ Community Edition was released I jumped at the opportunity and gave it a try.
To my amazement it was faster, less cluttered, streamlined, logically presented and just plainly put: the tool for the job. Over the time I’ve been using it, I also noticed that it encouraged me to better coding styles.
It’s kind-of like the “organic”-hype people have about food. You get Eclipse like you get normal veggies/fruit, the fruit that everyone buys. But then you get organic veggies and fruit that people just think to be a money-making scam. But in the end, check the biological composition for yourself and see what is best. IntelliJ IDEA is that organic IDE.
If this isn’t descriptive enough, try it out for 3 months and you’ll understand.
I’m in the process of saving up for the Enterprise Edition, just because it’s worth it.
December 20th, 2010 at 4:42 am
I just wanted to come back and say thank you for opening the source. I just re-upped from 9.x to 10.x ultimate. I think the price is more than fair and I will always have the tools I purchased in a form I can modify. I actually *own* the products I purchase. I love it.
– A Happy IntelliJ 10 user, releasing the source only reaffirmed my love for IntelliJ.
October 24th, 2011 at 12:43 am
Its a very exciting news for many application developers as they can convert this open source technology as per their needs and use as per their choice. I hope there would be a long list of users to join this community within a short period of time.