A few days ago I blogged that we will "most likely" be moving to the Eclipse Public License as our preferred license on code.intuit.com. The "most likely" disclaimer is being removed. We will be moving to the EPL.
Our lawyer is back from vacation and earlier today we got together with some folks in the Eclipse foundation to discuss the differences in the licenses, tactical details for transitioning to the EPL.
We also had a quick discussion about the formal state of the CPL on the Open Source Initiative web site. If you look at the OSI site today, you will now see that the CPL 1.0 is officially listed as superseded.
What is Next?
There is very little difference between the CPL and the EPL so as a developer using code.intuit.com software, there should be no real impact. However you should read and be familiar with the terms of the EPL.
We have some work to do on our side to switch over though. That includes:
- Notifying contributors of the license change
- Updating the general information on the code.intuit.com web site to support the changes
- Establish new projects under the Eclipse Public License starting now
- Update the existing CPL projects and code to the EPL license
Doing the nitty-gritty work of changing license headers files will need to be scheduled on a per project basis so we will be transitioning projects as we can over time.
If you are interested in tracking us, we'll be coordinating with the project administrators and discussing the details in Project Admin Forum.
What did we learn?
As a company that isn't known for it's open source contributions we are taking a big leap with code.intuit.com. We are learning as we go and we were not quite sure what the reaction to code.intuit.com would be. As it turns out, we have received a lot of good will and help from people that have more OS experience that we do. That has been very, very cool.
We also learned that, even as Open Source newbies, we have a voice. When we told folks at the Eclipse Foundation that the OSI site said nothing about CPL being superseded, voila, it was fixed.
Transparency and open collaboration. That's what it is all about and that is what we are striving for.
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