Eiffel Software to offer Dual Licensing Model for EiffelStudio

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

For more information, see licensing. To get started, download EiffelStudio.

EiffelStudio is based on the Eiffel programming language, the most extensive implementation of O-O concepts, standardized through ECMA and the International Standards Organization. Its core concepts, native only to Eiffel, such as Design by Contract™seamless developmentautomatic testingvoid safetyparallel programming, and modelling facilities allow developers to write predictable and controllable applications that are easy to maintain. EiffelStudio, which received the prestigious ACM Software Systems Award, is used by developers and design-team leaders in challenging enterprise environments in all areas of software development such as finance, health, defense ….With EiffelStudio, the applications they build run flawlessly 24×7, 365 days a year.