It's deeply disappointing to see Google moving to a proprietary IDE for Android. I've wasted time in the past learning proprietary development environments, and it's not a mistake I want to repeat — years of muscle memory and ecosystem knowledge down the drain when the IDE owner went out of business or didn't support the new platform I wanted to develop for — but it seems like now I have very little choice if I want to develop for Android. I mean, Eclipse will still work, at least unless Google breaks it, but it's falling by the wayside.
It's also alarming to me that nobody else here on Hacker News seems to be concerned about this.
I know Google isn't a free-software business like Red Hat, but they've benefited enormously from the work of the free software community, in particular in building Android, and they touted Android as being open. It was inspiring to see a really open phone platform birthed, but every month it seems like Android is less and less open. Supporting only a proprietary development toolchain is one more step toward the dark side.
...I was wrong. Completely wrong. I thought IDEA was proprietary, because it used to be, but IDEA is free software now. Furthermore, if I had investigated that question for only a couple of minutes before posting, I would have known that. Thank you for taking the time to correct me.
I'm happy that the truth is much brighter than what I thought.
The Jetbrains guys are also extremely skilled at creating IDEs.
Short of buying Jetbrains (which seems unnecessary unless Google wants to scale its tools team extremely aggressively and a bad things for other languages), I don't think Google could have made a better move.
It's also alarming to me that nobody else here on Hacker News seems to be concerned about this.
I know Google isn't a free-software business like Red Hat, but they've benefited enormously from the work of the free software community, in particular in building Android, and they touted Android as being open. It was inspiring to see a really open phone platform birthed, but every month it seems like Android is less and less open. Supporting only a proprietary development toolchain is one more step toward the dark side.