> Currently, the LSP implementation is partially closed-source, primarily for the sake of development speed convenience -- it heavily depends on parts of IntelliJ, Fleet, and our distributed Bazel build that allows us to iterate quickly and experiment much faster, cutting corners and re-using internal infrastructure where it helps. After the initial stabilization phase and defining the final set of capabilities, we will de-couple the LSP implementation from the internal repository and build pipelines and open source it completely

The full quote ...

Instead of working on this behind closed doors for the next year or so and then open sourcing everything, they are releasing some open source now with the intention to open source the rest later. I see no problem with that. Seems pragmatic. More companies should do that.

Bottom line, you are getting free stuff now. Some of it OSS now. All of it OSS later. No need to get upset.

Hey! I'm the author of the decision to "open-source" it in its current form.

Previous commenters nailed it -- it's much better to make the LSP generally accessible now -- to use it, to explore, to iterate on the actual feedback and not on the internal echo-chamber instead of cooking it internally for ~one year to make it fully OSS.

And not having to fight an uphill battle with the internal codebase (we have plenty of experience here -- Kotlin itself is fully OSS while IDEA part is mirrored through the internal monorepo) makes wonders.

> smuggles some kind of binary

These are basically IJ parts. No new dependencies, no statistics, no internet access from this code. It is also not obfuscated, so if you really worry about the contents -- any public bytecode decompiler will do.

Why overreact? Closed-source - bad, first steps towards open-source - bad. Is it always all or nothing?

Not like any Java language server.

Red-Hat/Microsoft ship Eclipse headless, and Oracle ships Netbeans headless, they don't ship an Apache 2 copy of IntelliJ.

And really, just get the full deal instead of running them headless alongside Electron package.