It’s not too surprising that the Eclipse Foundation thinks that the Eclipse Public License is a darn fine open source license. It is arguably the most commercially-friendly of the copyleft licenses, and one which is particularly well suited for fostering a community building a software platform.
So in June of 2008 we were thrilled with the announcement concerning the formation of the Symbian Foundation and their selection of the EPL as their community’s license. It was a huge endorsement of the EPL which immediately shattered a couple of misconceptions about it. (I’m thinking of things like “the EPL is a Java license”, “the EPL is only for Eclipse projects” and the like.) But of course migrating a large and mature code base to open source takes a lot of work to do, so the original announcement was basically a promise of good things to come.
Today is the day that promise becomes a reality. The Symbian Foundation is releasing its entire code base under the EPL to the world. This is a major accomplishment for that community, and one which they accomplished months earlier than originally planned. Please join me in congratulating the Symbian Foundation in achieving an important milestone in their voyage to becoming a truly open source and open development community.
