In the last 28 years of publishing software, I’ve had three distinct eras of software licensing. All of my recent stuff is available under the European Union Public License 1.2, and I thought to explain why.

cross-posted from: https://feddit.org/post/35110129

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.

  • raspberriesareyummy
    46·
    3 hours ago

    What a shitty choice of a license. Typical EU legal garbage full of duplications and “lawyers” thinking “more is better”.

    Also:

    The provisions of this Licence can be accepted by clicking on an icon ‘I agree’ placed under the bottom of a window displaying the text of this Licence or by affirming consent in any other similar way, in accordance with the rules of applicable law. Clicking on that icon indicates your clear and irrevocable acceptance of this Licence and all of its terms and conditions.

    Lol, these morons. Of course the EU pencil pushers would hyperfixate on “clicking a button”.

    /a European

    • libewa@feddit.org
      62·
      3 hours ago

      And the GPL has less legal garbage? One of the goals of the EUPL was that it can be understood by laymen, which doesn’t really hold true for the GPL. Those “simple” licenses like the MIT license don’t work in the EU btw, since you cannot completely renounce liability or copyright.

      • lemmyvore@feddit.nlEnglish
        4·
        40 minutes ago

        You may be right about liability, I don’t know. But public domain is a thing in the EU and it applies to expired copyright, things that cannot be copyrighted, explicit attribution etc.

        Besides, the MIT license does not renounce copyright, on the contrary.