a year. JetBrains lead Dmitry Jemerov said that most languages lacked the features they were looking for, except for Scala. However, he cited Scala's slow compilation time as a deficiency. One of Kotlin's stated goals is to compile as quickly as Java. In February 2012, JetBrains open-sourced the project under the Apache 2 license.

JetBrains expected Kotlin to drive sales of IntelliJ IDEA.