According to the European Commission - December 2017 leaflet, downloadable in .pdf format from the ISA2 site (https://ec.europa.eu/isa2/sites/isa/files/docs/publications/leaflet_eup…), the EUPL is the only Free Open Source Software with equal legal value across the EU and in 23 EU languages. It reconciles the strength of the copyleft licence with interoperability needs of the modern software.
The leaflet summarises the main four reasons for using the EUPL:
- Accessible: software distributed under the EUPL remains free and available to everyone.
- EU Law Compliant: it is valid in all Member States, with precisely formulated limitations of liability or warranty, and conforms to EU law requirements.
- Multilingual: it is available in 23 EU languages.
- Compatible: it is downstream compatible with many other copyleft licences, including business-friendly OSS licenses.
What is your opinion about this? Are copyleft and compatibility a "all-purpose" option? Would you prefer a permissive licence like the BSD-3, MIT or possibly Apache? Or a so-called "strong copyleft" like the GPL or AGPL?
Comments
Is the EU planning on making its own permissive license? If so, then I think a license similar to Apache, with the characteristics of being EU Law Compliant and being multilingual, would be great. However, there is also the issue of license proliferation...
The process of approving a new EUPL licence is quite long and so far there are few requests for making a version of the EUPL that would be totally permissive. Since the licensor may always grant more rights to recipients, it is possible that a copyright notice states for example:
“Licensed under the EUPL, extending the list of compatible licenses to all OSI-approved licenses”.
This would create a kind of "EUPL+"
I am currently conducting a seminar paper on the differences of Anglo-American copyright law and EU copyright law and their implication on Free and Open Source Software Licensing. In the course of writing this seminar paper I want to conduct an interview with a legal expert, especially for the European side and I hope that I can find some on this forum.
If anyone is interested, I would be happy if they could write me an email to my university email address: Mirko.Adam@student.uibk.ac.at
It is good to remain history:
In 2002, the Commission obtained a “Pooling Open Source software” (POSS) feasibility study, for assessing the benefits of software sharing. The explicit study recommendation was not to create a new licence, but rather to use existing well established licences, proposing the GPL (when copyleft conditions are needed), the BSD (when permissive conditions are convenient), and the MPL (in between): see section 2 of the study. (https://www.academia.edu/819539/Pooling_Open_Source_Software_An_IDA_Feasibility_Study_Unisys_June_2002) .
After this POSS study, the principle decision of distributing Commission assets as free/open source software was taken, but the IDA/IDabc head of unit wanted a more dedicated analysis of possible licensing conditions, in consideration of European law and assessing the differences between Anglo-American copyright law and EU copyright law: this was done in 2004 in close cooperation with the university of Namur: https://pure.unamur.be/ws/portalfiles/portal/55170602/5028.pdf.
After this second report, the decision to create a specific EU licence was taken, producing it in 2005 under the name EUPL.
For answering in detail to interview questions, you will be contacted via email.