17 April 2009, 15:03

Common Public Licence superseded by Eclipse Public Licence

Mike Milinkovich, Executive Director of the Eclipse Foundation, has announced in his blog, that the Common Public Licence (CPL) has been superseded by the Eclipse Public Licence (EPL). The move comes as the result of cooperation between the Foundation and IBM to help reduce licence proliferation. The process involved IBM assigning responsibility for the CPL to the Foundation and the Foundation then recognising the EPL 1.0 as the new version of the CPL. This in turn means that the Open Source Initiative (OSI) have moved the CPL from the “Licenses that are popular and widely used or with strong communities” to the “Superseded licenses” catagory.

Exisiting CPL licensed projects do not have to change their licensing, but can migrate to the EPL. New projects should use the EPL. The Eclipse Foundation created the EPL in 2004 as a successor to the CPL as it's own licence for Foundation projects. The Symbian Foundation has chosen the EPL for it's future projects and the EPL is one of the small number of licences that the Google Code project hosting site accepts. It is considered to be a business friendly licence which allows code to be distributed in object code form under a different licence.

(djwm)

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