JetBrains, the maker of the popular IntelliJ IDEA Java integrated development environment, has decided to deliver an open-source version of its tool set.

JetBrains on Oct. 15 announced a public preview of the free Community Edition of IntelliJ IDEA.

Moreover, "Starting with the upcoming Version 9.0, IntelliJ IDEA will be offered in two editions: Community Edition, [which will be] free and open source, and Ultimate Edition, which until today has been referred to as simply IntelliJ IDEA," JetBrains said in a news release. The release continued:

"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."

Sergey Dmitriev, CEO of JetBrains, said in the release, "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 plug-ins ourselves. 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 JetBrains release described the Community Edition of IntelliJ as a good choice for developers "working on pure Java/Groovy applications, or doing Swing development." This edition contains IntelliJ IDEA features such as "various refactorings and code inspections, coding assistance, debugging, TestNG and JUnit testing; CVS, Subversion and Git support, as well as Ant and Maven build integration." It continued, "To learn more and download the Community Edition Public Preview, please visit: http://www.jetbrains.com/idea/nextversion/free_java_ide.html."

The Ultimate Edition will continue to be offered commercially as a "complete set of Web and enterprise development tools. ... The new features of Version 9 include:

- Java EE 6, with JSF 2.0, JPA 2.0, Servlets 3.0, Bean validation, etc.

- Android, Google App Engine, GWT

- Adobe AIR, FlexUnit

- JavaScript refactorings and debugging

- Tapestry, OSGi

- PHP and more…"

What sets the IntelliJ IDEA Ultimate Edition apart from the open-source version, said the JetBrains statement, are features such as "tight Perforce, Rational ClearCase and Microsoft Team Foundation Server integration, dependency structure matrix, [and] advanced code manipulation with structural search and replace.

"To review the extended list of new features of IntelliJ IDEA Ultimate 9, and to download the Preview build, please visit http://www.jetbrains.com/idea/nextversion/index.html. Read about the differences between the Community Edition and the Ultimate Edition at http://www.jetbrains.com/idea/nextversion/editions_comparison_matrix.html."