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21 Oct 2009 - IntelliJ IDEA is open sourced. Why?

The cool kid, IntelliJ IDEA, has finally come to play with the young upstarts, NetBeans and Eclipse, in the free and open source Java IDE playground. This is great news but the big question is why now? And why has he left his most shiny toys at home? Is he going to be accepted? Will he be sent packing with a bloody nose? Here’s my initial thoughts.

Firstly, let me make some disclaimers:

  1. Sadly, I have never used IDEA before. The last paid IDE I used was JBuilder 7 and since then I have always used Eclipse and NetBeans.
  2. I am not against paying for software. I’ll spend my own money and my employers money on software that does a job right for me.
  3. My day job involves mostly Java SE and Swing on the desktop.
  4. My day job also means that I work mostly in Windows and Mac OS X, but also in Linux and occasionally Solaris.
  5. At home, I only use a Mac.
  6. I’m not sold on massive plugins that do everything for you, at least not to begin with. I like to understand how things work so that I know what the plugin should do and can fix it if it goes wrong!

Now I know that before this week I had never used IDEA but it is very highly rated by people whose opinion I respect. I have downloaded and installed it and will post again when I have been using it for a little while and have formed my own opinion of how it compares to NetBeans and Eclipse. For now I’m assuming that it offers more than both of these and I have to ask myself why JetBrains have open sourced IDEA now?

My gut reaction is that the commercial Java IDE market is dying. I suspect that IDEA sales are in decline and this is JetBrains last ditch effort to save IDEA as a commercial venture. NetBeans and Eclipse are more than ‘good enough’ for the majority of tasks that most Java developers face, so they have no need or desire to pay for an IDE, regardless of how good it may be. Listening to the Java Posse interview with the IDEA evangelist, Roman Strobl, and lead developer, Dmitry Jemerov, JetBrains strategy is to win developers over with the free Community Edition and expect them to upgrade to the Ultimate Edition.

Will it work? My gut reaction is no, for several reasons.

  1. Borland failed. IDEA may be better than JBuilder ever was (although to listen to Joe Nuxoll on the Java Posse you would think it was the best Java application ever written!) but Borland was the king of developer tools and it was beaten by Microsoft and the open source alternatives.
  2. All the Java EE goodies haven’t been open sourced, and the majority of Java developers they are trying to appeal to will be writing Java EE applications. If they can’t switch over wholesale to the Community Edition, why should they even install it. Especially when the equivalent plugins are also free and open source for NetBeans and Eclipse. They can install the trial of the Ultimate Edition and use it for 30 days, but they can do that already and would have done so if they were so inclined.
  3. Personally I find it very irritating when software vendors carve up their products so the free (or inexpensive) version has almost enough functionality to be useful but not quite. I think Adobe has hit the sweet spot with Photoshop Elements. It has all the functionality that 80% of Photoshop customers need, and the remaining 20% have to buy the full version. For me, IDEA will probably do everything I want but I am probably in the minority and if it does, I have no need to upgrade anyway.

I hope I’m wrong and that JetBrains can continue to make money out of IDEA. Software doesn’t get that much respect without reason. If they can’t make money on IDEA I hope the make money on their other products because I would hate to see an innovative software vendor like them go out of business. I also hope that they fully open source IDEA if it doesn’t work out for them. Competition drives innovation and neither NetBeans or Eclipse wouldn’t be as good as they are if it wasn’t for IDEA leading the way.

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