Got a bit of an honestly “yeah this kills the little joy I had left” situation - our opensource plugin intellij-elixir has been forked, and has been submitted to the Jetbrains marketplace as a paid plugin, without attribution.
We’re Apache 2.0 licensed, I honestly am more bummed /unimpressed that the code is being used for profit more than anything - it doesn’t violate the license (nor should it, that’s the point of the Apache 2.0 license!), it’s just tiring.
The plugin authors business name is also Jetplugins, which is pushing it a bit.
It’s incredibly lazy, it doesn’t even rename their distribution.
although the license prohibits reverse engineering there’s a few signs that it’s heavily vibe-coded and barely tested (judging by 100’s of commits in author’s private repo and bugs, e.g. Rename of function output shows dialog with prefilled identifier NameArityInterval(name=outcome, arityInterval=ArityInterval(1, 1)) and then not working anyway even if correct identifier typed / won’t rename usages, which is a bit deceptive for a marketed feature)
Good catch.
What bothers me the most is that the author seems to have turned copying open-source projects into a business model to make money off them. Once or twice would have been okay, but he’s going too far.
I’m going to change the license for my open-source projects from MIT to, I think, AGPL-3.0 right away.
We’re witnessing the death of permissive good faith open source when people like this show up…
It just seems.. Like this is something where JetBrains could and absolutely should take some action?
Also - you’re saying the plugin was taken without renaming the distribution? I swear I saw a JB response in some thread somewhere on here that there is intent to implement logic to disallow releases where classpaths for example are identical - basically, my interpretation and is that what you’re pointing out might be genuinely persecuted by JetBrains.
Actually clicking through to the author you can see the beautifully claude-coded webapp:
And, I haven’t gone through every single release here to check it.. But isn’t basically everything they uploaded just a 1:1 rip off with a license requirement slapped on it?
I honestly don’t see how this could, in any way, be justifiable and allowed. The project being MIT Apache 2 or whatever other permissive OSS license you can come up with is one thing.
But I don’t think it does (for the very least it shouldn’t) mean that it should be treated with this permissiveness on the JetBrains plugin marketplace. It literally seems like impersonating the plugin, since clicking through the reviews and reddit I get the feeling that many might not realize what is going on, that the author is some random guy who just stole the code and published it as his “Pro version”…
I wish that JetBrains was more strict with managing the marketplace from the get go. I see so many low effort, low quality plugins around (that even seem sketchy) without problems. And then when this happens…
Why should any author want to open source and publish a plugin to the JetBrains marketplace if he gets zero to no protection from low effort copies and impersonations that are violating even the few clauses the permissive licenses have?
Solidity Pro is a package-renamed fork (me.serce.solidity → dev.jetplugins.solidity): ~65% of the original’s classes are present with identical names (e.g. SolidityParser, _SolidityLexer, ide/SolBraceMatcher), and 78 resource files are byte-for-byte identical.
The MIT license requires that “the above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.” Neither the copyright notice nor the license text
appears anywhere in the Solidity Pro distribution. This is a license violation.
Slint Pro copies the original’s core (parser, PSI, LSP client/server classes) and ships byte-identical icon assets, again with no MIT copyright or permission notice included. Same violation as above.
Elixir Pro (plugin #32247) – Apache-2.0, attribution missing
Elixir Pro is a fork (org.elixir_lang → dev.jetplugins.elixir) that ships the artifact literally named intellij-elixir-2026.1.11.jar and bundles the unmodified intellij-elixir.jps-builder.jar and
intellij-elixir.jps-shared.jar from our project. ~71% of our classes are present verbatim and 65 resources are byte-identical.
A paid closed-source fork is permitted under Apache 2.0. Apache 2.0 §4 requires that a copy of the license be included with the distribution, and none is present.
Now these ones are mentioned, but the licenses again stripped.
Hi guys, thanks for chiming in here. I see your concerns, and thank you for raising them. The concerns raised by Joshua were valid; I was indeed violating the MIT license by not including them. After Joshua raised this, I’ve investigated the issue, and it was caused by overly aggressive Proguard task, which removed these items. I’ve addressed this for all reported plugins, and republished them.
It’s never my intention to rip people off or not provide credits where they’re due; in all plugin descriptions, when the plugin does build on an open source version, there’s a reference to it, and in certain cases I recommend using the Open Source version.
I’m providing support on all of these plugins, as you can see in the public repo, and I’ve spent an incredible amount of time fixing plugins. For example, the Elixir plugin doesn’t work on Window out of the box, and doesn’t deal with multi project files, didn’t support debugging (not sure if does now). I’ve fixed and improved all of that, which took several weeks, and with that I believe I’m providing a better experience than the original plugin.
The small fee I’m asking is not for the software I’m building, but it’s a small amount of money to keep the maintenance of these plugins sustainable, and to deliver the quality which can be expected of JetBrains products and plugins. I’m unfortunately not in a position to do this work for free.
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