Added a workaround for Idea 13 compilation issue.
Reverted the use of https for now. This change is not critical for 1.12 but it would be better to include it. Reverting this commit now allows us to get stage 4 green through the weekend and have an option to release the RC on Monday. In meantime Luke can figure out the problem on Monday (we made progress on it today, it seems we know what needs to be done) and we can get this change into release branch again and get it released.
Added link to the Gradle 2.0 announcement.