Eiffel Software has finally relicensed EiffelStudio. The binary-only pain is over.

Some weeks ago, roumors had it that Eiffel Software will only release the sources under a non-free license (non-commercial use only). The ceremony, where Bertrand Meyer pushed the magical red button to import the sources into the repository was held today. Unfortunately, I was not informed about the particular date and time, so I did not have a chance to attend it... too bad.

However, EiffelStudio is now dual-licensed, under their previous non-free EULA and under the GNU General Public License. It have the impression that Eiffel Software does not understand the GPL, they are claiming that one is not allowed to create commercial applications with the GPL version of Eiffel Studio:

"Users who write commercial proprietary software must purchase the corresponding licenses and may freely choose how to distribute their software. Users who donate their source code to the Open Source community can use the Open Source version and must distribute their software under the same license."

Remember: The GPL does not restrict the act of running a program at all and the Eiffel standard library is licensed under the DFSG-compliant Eiffel Forum License (a BSD License derivative). There is no possiblity to enforce such a non-commercial use only of EiffelStudio with these two very licenses.

Thanks Eiffel Software and Bertrand Meyer for finally doing the right thing, and to Eiffel Team at the ETH Zurich for constantly bitching them about the issue while the last years. Of course, I will prepare packages for Debian based on my non-free unofficial packages.

Update: Every binary which is build with EiffelStudio is linked against the EiffelStudio run-time. This run-time is licensed under the GPL, so every derivated work (and that is what every binary is then) must be licensed under the GPL too. Actually, my point is that the GPL does not exclude commercial use. Due to bad wording, people did misinterpret it as 'you can distribute proprietary, commercial programs' instead of 'you can distribute and sell free (as in GPL) programs'.