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.