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There seems to be a lot of press regarding the announcement that Intellij is being made available for free as an open source tool. Yet from what I read of the licenses, that's only true if the end product is open source and free. If you plan on selling your end product, you can't use the free community version.

Have I misread something?

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3 Answers

up vote 17 down vote accepted

Only a subset of IntelliJ, the IntelliJ community edition has been released as open source software. The page that you linked to describes a special license of the "Ultimate" edition (which is not open source), that they are specifically giving for free to people who promise that they will only use it for writing open source software for non-commercial purposes.

According to the FAQ, the new open source version of IntelliJ is available under an Apache license.

To clarify: The community edition of IntelliJ is available under the Apache license, which means you can use it for whatever purposes you want, including writing proprietary, commercial software. It also mean you can modify the code of IntelliJ yourself, sell modified versions of it, anything like that, as long as you abide by the Apache license.

The community edition does not have all of the functionality of the ultimate edition. It only has some of the functionality; for instance, it has support for Java and Groovy, but not Python or Scala. But the community edition can be used for any purposes you want, as long as you follow the terms of the Apache license.

The ultimate edition (which includes extra functionality as listed in their comparison) normally costs money. However, they are also offering the ultimate edition for free to people who promise that they are using it for non-commercial purposes for an open source project (I have no idea how they would actually enforce this, but that's beside the point). I believe this is an offer that they've had since before they released IntelliJ community edition as open source software; as a way of helping out open source development, without giving away everything to everyone.

So, go ahead and download the community edition, and use it for anything you want, from developing free software to developing commercial software to modifying IntelliJ yourself and selling it.

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I'm not sure about the usability of the community version, but it does appear that you can only use it for free if and only if your end product is open source and free. That seems like quite a constraint, so why open source at all? –  Robot Oct 18 '09 at 14:05
No, that's not right. The Apache license allows you to use the community edition for any purpose you want. What is available under that "open source only" license is the full version of IntelliJ. I've added a clarification to my answer to see if that helps. –  Brian Campbell Oct 18 '09 at 16:30
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You will find that the free version has most of the features of IntelliJ removed, so you can get experience with IntelliJ, but if you really want to do anything of complexity with it you will need to buy the full-featured version.

But, if you use the free version how can anyone tell which IDE you used to create the java source?

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Unless I misread the community feature set, J2EE support has been removed, but you can still create complex apps that are stand-alone. –  Robot Oct 18 '09 at 14:06
Support for most of the other languages has been removed. There was a question about people upgrading to IntelliJ now that it has been made free, and there is a link showing what is in the Ultimate and what is not in the free one. –  James Black Oct 18 '09 at 14:15
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IntelliJ has a licenses folder that you can check out; For instance mine is located under here JetBrains\IntelliJ IDEA 129.111\license

You can see that there is a file called IDEA_OpenSource_license.txt


Subject to the terms, conditions, and limitations set forth in this Agreement, including any amendments thereto, Licensor hereby grants to Licensee a limited, non-exclusive, non-transferable,royalty-free license to use the Software for a period of 1 (one) year as follows:

(a) Licensee may: (i) install the version of the Software that has been specified in License Certificate on multiple Clients and operating systems; (ii) use the Software by Authorized Users solely for the purpose of development of non-commercial open source projects that meet the Open Source Definition at http://www.opensource.org/docs/definition_plain.html, and (iii) make one back-up copy of the Software solely for archival purposes.


Which seems to completely go against what the Apache License allows you to do

I wonder if this is a relic of a previous License before it was open sourced?


Dmitry Jemerov has posted on the following on the Jetbrains blog [source]

IntelliJ IDEA Community Edition is completely free and open-source, licensed under the Apache 2 license and can be used for any kind of development. Android Studio has the same licensing terms.

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