Home Contest FAQ

FAQ

1. Licensing

  1. The plugin we are going to improve for the Contest is currently licensed under the LGPL license, which your context does not allow. Could you consider adding LGPL to your list of licenses?
  2. One of the goals of our contest is to obtain a set of professionally written plugins, which could be considered by other developers as good open source samples for creating their own plugins. BSD and Apache licenses have the least restrictive conditions -- they allow developers to release works, based on code issued under one of these two, under whatever licenses they would like. That’s why we decided not to go beyond these two licenses.
    Regarding your product, you can submit a separate version for the contest under one of the licenses we allow, and if you decide to stay with LGPL afterwards, you can release subsequent versions under this license. Our licensing restriction concerns only the particular version submitted in the context of the Contest.

2. During development

  1. I'd like to release a first tiny version very early on and continue development based on feedback. Is that ok with the terms? Will the plugin be judged based on the final version uploaded before December, 21?
  2. You are welcome to submit your plugin in the very early stages of development and expose it to the people, to get their feedback, comments and suggestions. You can release several versions before the end of the contest -- only the final version counts.
  1. Why do you suggest announcing future plugins beforehand, even if one is not ready to upload anything?
  2. Announcing plugin before its early version is ready allows you to peg an idea and start receiving feedback (or even to find coauthors) as early as possible. For an announced plugin you can request to provide you with the space on our Confluence, to say more about your future plugin and to gather comments and feedback from the community. Thus you stand a better chance to win.
  1. Where can I get more info about how to write plugins for IntelliJ IDEA?
  2. Visit the page Information for Plugin Developers. On the EAP site on the page "Download Selena" you can download both the latest build of IntelliJ IDEA 7.0 M2 and the latest version of DevKit (containing OpenAPI javadoc / sources and plugins sources), which is placed in the file ideaXXXX-dev.zip, where XXXX is the latest number of product build. We also recommend that you read this article written by Onno Scheffers, where he shares his experience of plugin writing in details, with screenshots and detailed explanations.
  1. How to increase my chances to win?
  2. The invaluable experience accumulated over two contests run by Atlassian and one by JetBrains is best summed up using a quote from Jonathan Nolen, the project lead of Atlassian’s contest: "The best plugins were released early and iterated... People were able to start crafting their submission page as soon as we announced the contest. As it turned out, several people started doing this within the first week or so, and they got VERY valuable feedback from the Confluence community. They had people downloading and using their plugins, giving feedback, design suggestions and filing bugs for 6 weeks of the 8 week contest. Many of them released multiple versions of their plugin before the contest ended. Those people who stayed quiet until the last day didn't get any of that." We suggest that you consult the Plugin Wish List to check out what is in demand – this way you will be able to better target your efforts. You are also welcome to discuss your plugin ideas with the community, which resides in the forums news://news.intellij.net/jetbrains.intellij.plugins and news://news.intellij.net/jetbrains.intellij.openapi (and is also accessible on the web at Plugins forum and Open API forum). We also recommend that you use the latest IntelliJ IDEA 7.0 M2 release (accessible via EAP) to gain access to the late breaking information about IntelliJ IDEA modern API.
  1. How can I form a team?
  2. On the contest entry page for your plugin you can add additional authors (they must have an account on the JetBrains plugin repository site, too). The control for this is in the upper right corner of the page.

3. Registration

  1. Should I register once again to access IntelliJ IDEA EAP?
  2. Unfortunately, yes. In the nearest future, we’ll create one common entrance to both resources, so you will be able to login to the Plugin Repository and to the EAP site using one common account.