JetBrains just announced an open source edition of their popular IntelliJ IDE, under the Apache 2.0 license. Ian Skerrett, Director of Marketing at the Eclipse Foundation welcomes this move, while Eugene Kuleshov asking if that is beginning of the end.
I'd agree with Eugene, this is definitely beginning of the end... With some difference: now eclipse is more close to the end than it was 2 years ago.
To understand this let's guess JetBrains' motivation:
Please do not forget JetBrains is a small company. So a few hundred more users paid for IDE is probably nothing for IBM but a value for JetBrains. Moving to open source will very likely decrease their sales in short term because of some potential IDEA users who knows about IDEA will not buy it but will use free one. There will be some time while open-source will spread a world and reach potential users who are not aware of IDEA yet (if such people ever exists). And some of JetBrains potential users who are thinking about to buy IDEA will be OK with free version.
So considering this fact let's think why they decide to move open source?
Guess #1: Their are focusing on more profitable products like ReShaper; do not count on IDEA as a profitable product and let it be open source to gain indirect benefits. If this is true, nothing positive about this move, and this is just a beginning of IDEA end.
Personally I do not believe in case #1
Guess #2: This is beginning of world-wide "JetBrains attack" on the IDE market. There is only 2 products which were restraining such an attack: eclipse and netbeans. Because while eclipse and/or netbeans are strong -- such attack would be very stupid move for (again!) small self-funded company. If guess #2 is closer to the reality, and JetBrains decided to open source IDEA -- this is a serious message to eclipse: JetBrains do not consider eclipse as a competitor in the middle term, and they believe they can take significant part of current eclipse and NB market.
Personally, I more believe in guess #2, considering stalled innovation in the eclipse ecosystem (except great things still happening at modeling); inability to explain where eclipse is moving; how it will look like in 2010 or 2012; suicide with OSGi resurrection I blogged 1.5 yrs ago, and many more things going or not going within eclipse ecosystem.
Reality of course is much more complex, but I can't see any good signal for eclipse ecosystem in relation with this event. Collaboration between two communities? Nonsense for the similar reason: JetBrains is very small. This could be possible if JetBrains will have 50% of eclipse market, which just support guess #2. And of course if they even had such plans -- they were able to make them real many times.
Hi Andrey, thanks for turning on comments!
"Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning." -- Winston Churchill.
There are now three(!) great open source Java IDEs (.NET still has zero) and they can all compete on a level playing field. No more bullshit excuses about people only using Eclipse because it's free. The fight is on, but I believe NetBeans will suffer more than Eclipse. NB is coming from behind, has a smaller user base than either Eclipse or IDEA, and it has an uncertain future because of the Oracle/Sun deal.
Your guess #2 makes no sense to me. Maybe JetBrains thinks they can conquer the IDE market, but what's the point if they can no longer monetise it? They will go bust before they can complete such an "attack". Far more likely is guess #1 -- they will use the open source IDE as a platform to sell higher-value products. That makes a lot of sense and it doesn't spell the end for either Eclipse or IDEA. Nor, even, the beginning of the end ;-)
Hi Neil,
Great comment, thank you! I'm 100% supporting your opinion. However the message I was trying send in not about JetBrains, but about eclipse:
- There was no evolution in eclipse-as-IDE-platform for past years, so we see a degradation here
- There was an evolution trend in IDEA past years, ant they are in parity with eclipse now.
- This parity allowed JetBrains to go open source now
- Extrapolation of these degradation/evolution trends do not make me happy about eclipse future.
Kind Regards,
Andrey