Eiffel Software to Offer Dual Licensing for EiffelStudio

EiffelStudio cross-platform IDE available under both commercial and Open Source license

Santa Barbara, California - (April 5, 2006) - Eiffel Software today announced that the latest version of its cross-platform IDE EiffelStudio™ is now available under Dual Licensing, enabling users to choose between a license for commercial development and a license for Open Source development.

Eiffel Software's Dual Licensing model is based on the principle of fair exchange. 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.

"With our new licensing model, our current customers will maintain full control of their applications, while newcomers from the Open Source community will be able to take advantage of EiffelStudio as well," says Larry Miller, director of business development at Eiffel Software. "We have always worked in very close cooperation with our users to shape our technology and the possibility of working more closely with the Open Source community is exciting."

EiffelStudio is the cornerstone of the Eiffel Development Framework™, a simple and powerful system for developing bug-free software applications at a fraction of the cost of other tools. It is based on the ECMA International standard for the widely acclaimed Eiffel analysis, design and programming language. Thanks to the power of the language and the tools of the environment, EiffelStudio's users continuously demonstrate that they can produce 2 to 10 times as much software in the same amount of time as can be achieved using other languages and toolsets. Eiffel has gained prominence in recent years among developers and design team leaders in challenging enterprise environments in the financial, insurance and government sectors as well as among independent development teams.

"We have envisioned a release of EiffelStudio under a Dual Licensing model including Open Source for a long time," says Emmanuel Stapf, head of the compiler team at Eiffel Software, "but we did not want to rush the process and decided to first standardize the technology through ECMA to give the programming community the guarantee of a solid base for Open Source developments. Everything is now complete and we are thrilled to enter the Open Source world with our technology. With the success reported by our commercial customers we expect amazing developments from the Open Source community, which will give EiffelStudio unprecedented visibility."

EiffelStudio is the best IDE to create robust, reusable object-oriented applications and libraries that run on a wide variety of platforms including, Linux, Unix, Windows, Mac, VMS and embedded systems. Eiffel's unique Design by Contract™ feature makes it especially easy to produce high-quality code that developers can safely and reliably use in business-critical applications.

Features of EiffelStudio include:

Seamless coverage of the entire software lifecycle
Cross-platform availability (Windows, .NET, Linux, Unix, MacOS, VMS and others)
Full support for Design by Contract
Automatic documentation generation
Diagramming support (BON and UML) with full reversibility between diagram and code views
Extensive browsing, debugging and refactoring capabilities
Thousands of reusable library classes from Eiffel Software and other providers
Numerous reference sites for large, mission-critical projects in major industries
Guarantee of quality and productivity gains

The Eiffel language is among the easiest to learn of all programming languages. Extensive support for new users is available at http://www.eiffel.com/developers.

Availability:

EiffelStudio under Dual Licensing agreement is available immediately via the company's website, http://www.eiffel.com. Onsite training and consulting are also available from the company by contacting us.

About Eiffel Software

Eiffel Software (a division of ISE) is the world leader in Eiffel pure object-oriented programming tools. Founded in 1985, Eiffel Software produces proven professional tools and component libraries for business-critical and enterprise software developments. Eiffel Software's products enable their customers to output more and higher-quality software in less time than with any other development tools available. Its users span the globe, in industries ranging from large financial institutions, technology manufacturing, government and defense contractors, to health care providers and more. For more information, contact us or call (805) 685-1006.

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