This year I decided to switch my “default license” to EUPL-1.2. This is an OSI-approved free software license created and published by the European Union. And it is quite a divergence from the licenses I’ve used in the past. EUPL is a strong copyleft license that closes the “SaaS loophole” by requiring reciprocal licensing regardless of how the software is distributed.
Over the years it has been clear that we in the “open source” camp (as opposed to the “free software” camp) were wrong all along.
We won the debate, and gained little for users or developers. All that our efforts did was to make it easier for big corporations build things more cheaply and for billionaires to become trillionaires.
And so it is time to stop messing about with permissive licenses. If corporations don’t want to use our software under our terms, they are free to spend the effort or tokens to build their own.
From what I understood,
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Here is a good comparison of different licenses: https://interoperable-europe.ec.europa.eu/collection/eupl/solution/licensing-assistant/find-and-compare-software-licenses For example, if I want to compare with major GPL versions (AGPL-3.0, GPL-2.0, GPL-3.0), then here is a table: https://interoperable-europe.ec.europa.eu/licence/compare/EUPL-1.2;AGPL-3.0-only;GPL-3.0-only;GPL-3.0-or-later Although I also think they need to improve this comparison table, because as opposed to the first link, the table does not have an on-hover text to show again the meaning of the different rows.
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This is the English text of the license: https://interoperable-europe.ec.europa.eu/sites/default/files/custom-page/attachment/2020-03/EUPL-1.2%20EN.txt
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Here you can see the license in other languages, also in PDF if you prefer: https://interoperable-europe.ec.europa.eu/collection/eupl/eupl-text-eupl-12
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Strong point of this license: it aims to protect your code and enforces it to remain free in a SaaS scenario, similar to AGPL.
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It allows mixing EUPL-1.2 code with other copyleft licenses, less restrictive than GPL. I haven't carefully and slowly read yet if it can be used to simply circumvent the copyleft features. Has anyone else publicly analyzed it? Maybe it means that you can use e.g. GPL or MPL inside EUPL-1.2, but not the other way around?
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They clearly pin the jurisdiction! This is big boon. And one way or another, I clearly trust EU's handling of licenses and law better than that of the US. (Sorry, but that is true.)
P.S. It's interesting. Has anyone in this (fediverse) community used the license already? What is your impression?
P.P.S. Personally, I wish they would not start their PDF with preambles such as
COMMISSION IMPLEMENTING DECISION (EU) 2017/863
updating the open source software licence EUPL to further facilitate the sharing and reuse of
software developed by public administrations
In order to further facilitate the sharing and reuse of software developed by public administrations concerning
the use of an open source software licence, a new EUPL version, EUPL v. 1.2, should be adopted.
If I read this word-to-word, my brain wants to zone out. I cannot / don't fully want to understand what they're talking about. I want the license first, and I want to learn when and how it came to be later, on a separate page. (Not joking or being sarcastic here, I literally would want it later, e.g. last page or referenced below.) Otherwise it distracts attention and it gives me a feeling that they might be too full of themselves and busy virtue signaling, as opposed to being a strong ally and have my back covered. Maybe I'm exaggerating? Anyway, that's just one downside. I do like some of the other parts listed above.