From the article: And, this is true whether the Core is GPL'd or permissively licensed. In both cases, the final story is the same: take a proprietary license

From the article: And, this is true whether the Core is GPL'd or permissively licensed. In both cases, the final story is the same: take a proprietary license or be stuck with cripple-ware. Except that IntelliJ Community Edition is a perfectly usable and able IDE already. In fact, Android Studio is based on it. Certainly not crippleware. And in this case I very much like this model. InteliJ CE is open source software under the Apache License version 2.0. If JetBrains would disappear tomorrow (hopefully not!). A non-profit project or another company could continue where they left off. That said, I am a very happy user of the Ultimate Edition :).