IBM served as the agreement steward for the CPL, while the Eclipse Foundation is the agreement steward for the EPL.

There were two primary differences between the CPL and EPL-1.0. The original version 1.0 of the Eclipse Public License was based on IBM’s Common Public License (CPL). In this blog, we’ll review the history of the Eclipse Public License, analyze its key provisions, and share some of the bigger projects that use it.

Much like fellow weak copyleft licenses LGPL and Mozilla Public License 2.0, the EPL carries more requirements on the use of the licensed code than permissive licenses, but offers more freedoms than strong copyleft licenses. (Assume all references to the Eclipse Public License are about the EPL-2.0 unless otherwise noted.) The EPL-1.0 has been deprecated (and the Eclipse Foundation recommends OSS contributors consider switching to 2.0), so we’ll focus primarily on version 2.0 in this blog. There are two versions of the EPL - the original EPL-1.0, which was released in 2004, and the EPL-2.0, which was published in 2017.

The Eclipse Public License (EPL) is a weak copyleft open source license maintained by the Eclipse Foundation.

How to use eclipse in a sentence