Dear JetBrains Omea Users,
We are pleased to finally come to you with these news.
We know that many of you were waiting for this news for so long, and we would like to thank you for your patience.
So, after several months of thorough work on polishing the software itself and its API, we are happily ready to announce the full availability of our "Omea" line of products in their open-source incarnation.
We hope that this step will allow us to rise the development of this great product to a new level and to attract energy and talents of everybody who likes to participate in this "adventure".

Omea - both source and companion files - is now distributed under GNU GPL v2 License (http://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0.html).

Technical Details

Apart from the development of new features and fixing old bugs which did not stop all these months (though that followed mostly our personal priorities, look at (1) in the list of references below), Omea has overcome significant evolutionary changes, which will be useful for wider scope development:

1. Completely reconfigured and cleaned up the project structure.
2. Switched from Perforce to SVN as the source code control.
3. Transitioned from VS7 to VS9 IDE, from .NET 1.1 to .NET 3.0 framework. We think that the only chance for Omea to be on the "wave" is to use the latest possible tools, libraries and technologies while continuing living on top of the .Net platform that proved to be productive and flexible.
4. Build process switched from NAnt to MSBuild 3.5, and the integration builds inside JetBrains are run on the TeamCity platform which is the logical step in order to use the most innovative technologies.
5. In the close future we will switch from JIRA to another issue tracking system (to be announced later).
6. Switched to the Windows-Installer-based setup infrastructure, authored in MS WiX, which is also a step towards the wider adoption of Omea sources.
   ... And more (for details please check the Omea confluence page referenced in the list of references section below)

Who and How Can Submit Changes

The rules below are not completely elaborated yet, and are the subject for discussion. You are welcome to join this discussion in our newsgroups.

• Obviously, it is not reasonable to give everybody RW rights for the repository, thus, initially everyone will have just the RO access.
• People who just develop their plugins can join their source code into a separate folder in common product tree. They are granted RW access to this subtree, and may give credentials to anybody they consider to be trusted.
• People wishing to change/fix/develop core components have to send their changes in the form of patches, which are analyzed on the JetBrains' side and either accepted or rejected for some reason.
• People which show themselves as "Omea Masters" will get RW access rights after the standard procedure of submitting their credentials to JetBrains.

Short Reference for Omea resources

(1) Public Omea Confluence page: http://www.jetbrains.net/confluence/display/OMEA/Home
(2) JetBrains Omea Product page: http://www.jetbrains.com/omea/
(3) JetBrains Omea news groups on the news.jetbrains.com server: news://news.jetbrains.com/jetbrains.omea.pro, news://news.jetbrains.com/jetbrains.omea.reader, news://news.jetbrains.com/jetbrains.omea.dev.
(4) Omea Dev Channel (online chat): xmpp:omea@conference.jabber.labs.intellij.net.
(5) Omea Subversion Repository: http://svn.jetbrains.org/omeaopen

We hope you enjoy this new approach, and wish you always develop with pleasure!
— The JetBrains Omea Team