{"id":1880,"date":"2009-10-16T08:22:48","date_gmt":"2009-10-16T07:22:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/1880-intellij-idea-goes-free-and-open-source.html"},"modified":"2009-10-16T08:22:48","modified_gmt":"2009-10-16T07:22:48","slug":"intellij-idea-goes-free-and-open-source","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/1880-intellij-idea-goes-free-and-open-source.html","title":{"rendered":"IntelliJ IDEA goes free and open source"},"content":{"rendered":"

Yesterday JetBrains announced that its core product, the IDEA IDE for Java, is becoming open source under the Apache 2.0 license<\/a>. There will be a free Community Edition and a commercial edition with more features<\/a>. This list of additional features not<\/strong> in the free edition is rather extensive, including UML class diagrams, code coverage, Android support, JSP debugging, JavaScript debugging, support for other languages such as Ruby, SQL, HTML, JavaScript, ActionScript, PHP, support for additional version control systems including Team Foundation Server, ClearCase and Perforce, and above all specific support for frameworks and technologies including Rails, Spring, EJB, Tomcat, JBoss and WebSphere, and even Adobe AIR.<\/p>\n

In other words, the free part is the core IDE plus a few features; the commercial edition adds a lot of value for most users.<\/p>\n

CEO Sergey Dimitriev remarks:<\/p>\n

\n

Open source has become the mainstream, and we continue to embrace it as an exciting challenge. In brief, we’re not changing direction \u2014 we’re moving forward.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

IDEA is an excellent and popular IDE and last time I looked I found it more productive and enjoyable to use than its obvious alternative, Eclipse<\/a>. I imagine that IntelliJ is hoping to strengthen the community and availability of add-ons for IDEA, as well as attracting new users.<\/p>\n

Although this is welcome news \u2013 and I\u2019d encourage any Java developer to try the product \u2013 it would be interesting to know more about why JebBrains is taking this step. Borland\u2019s JBuilder was once highly successful, until the free Eclipse offering eroded its market share. Seeing how important the add-on community was in Eclipse, Borland belatedly issued a free JBuilder and sought to make it an alternative IDE platform for third parties, but by then it was too late. JBuilder was discontinued and a new product of the same name appeared in its place, built on Eclipse; it is still available<\/a> but is now a niche product. I\u2019ve not got any up-to-date figures but I\u2019d expect JBuilder\u2019s market share to be tiny now.<\/p>\n

Unlike JBuilder, IDEA has remained popular despite Eclipse. Comments on stackoverflow<\/a>, for example, show how well liked it is:<\/p>\n

\n

Eclipse was the first IDE to move me off of XEmacs. However, when my employer offered to buy me a Intellij IDEA license if I wanted one it only took 3 days with an evaluation copy to convince me to go for it.<\/p>\n

It seems like so many small things are just nicer.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The problem is that the free Eclipse, or free NetBeans<\/a>, or free Oracle JDeveloper<\/a>, are good enough to get your work done, making it hard to compete; and I am not sure whether the addition of free IntelliJ IDEA to the list is a sign of strength or weakness.<\/p>\n

My guess is that serious users will still want the commercial edition with its many additional features, so this may not be as radical a step as it first appears.<\/p>\n

Technorati Tags: intellij<\/a>,java<\/a>,jbuilder<\/a>,eclipse<\/a>,netbeans<\/a>,jetbrains<\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Yesterday JetBrains announced that its core product, the IDEA IDE for Java, is becoming open source under the Apache 2.0 license. There will be a free Community Edition and a commercial edition with more features. This list of additional features not in the free edition is rather extensive, including UML class diagrams, code coverage, Android … Continue reading IntelliJ IDEA goes free and open source<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,49,62,63,80],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1880","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-adobe","category-java","category-open-source","category-oracle","category-software-development"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1880","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1880"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1880\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1880"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1880"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1880"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}