On 18 September 2012, JOINUP published a confirmation of the May announcement that the IT department of the European Parliament will provide an open source version of At4am, its software for authoring and management of amendments on parliamentary texts.

Claudio Fabiani, Project Manager at the Directorate General of the European Parliament, announced the first release by the summer of 2013, making the main functions available to everybody under open source conditions.

At4am could be precious for any kind of multi-lingual collaborative work: it makes texts instantly available in 23 languages; contributors can submit amendments in their own language. It helps translators to quickly find the relevant parts to translate. No wonder that the software, introduced at the EP last year, is increasingly popular among MEPs: some 100,000 amendments drafted using At4am in 2011 and expected growth of about 50% in 2012.

Who says open source says “distribution under an open source licence”. The Parliament is still at the beginning of the process and will have to go through the licence selection.

The choice of a licence for distributing AT4AM is still open. It seems that the parliament could prefer a “share alike” (or copyleft) licence, protecting the software from appropriation by a third party by mandating the reuse of the same licence in the case of re-distribution, even after modifying the software. This closes ways to take it away from the public. If this approach (which is also the approach of the European Commission) is verified, this should exclude too permissive open source licences as the BSD, MIT etc. Because AT4AM is a server-based application, it looks important to select a licence covering “software as a service” (SaaS) where the covered software is not only distributed or downloaded as a package, as the case may be (i.e. ready to reinstall on another computer), but used and communicated on line to the public.

In his presentation at the 13-15 September World e-Parliament conference 2012, Claudio Fabiani has left the question wide open: the project includes a “release of the code under open source licence(s)”. The plural form “licence(s)” indicates that several licences could be applied (meaning “dual licensing”).

One of the obvious candidates is the European Union Public Licence (EUPL), which is used by the European Commission for most “EC software” distributed on JOINUP and has a working value in the multiple EU languages. The EUPL is both share alike and covering SaaS.

Another candidate is the Gnu AGPLv3, which covers also SaaS and is a derivative of the GPLv3, a licence build on the historical success of the GPLv2 (the famous GPL). These licences are promoted by the Free Software Foundation (FSF – based in Boston - USA) as the heart of a licence-centric legal scheme. They have their working value in English only, but are widely used worldwide and inherit from more than 20 years of the free software community efforts and active promotion. When FSF developers and activists insist on the wording “free software” (as freedom) instead of “open source” (a term that they try to avoid), it is to underline the fundamental of their philosophic movement, which is to keep and maximize the control of their free software community over the technology used in homes, schools and businesses: “Computers work for our individual and communal benefit, not for proprietary software companies or governments who might seek to restrict and monitor us” they wrote (http://www.fsf.org/about/).

In a meeting organised in July 2012, the “European Parliament Free Software User Group” (EPFSUG) – a group of supporters of the free software community working on novel e-mail software - http://epfsug.eu/mission-statement - invited two representatives of the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) to present their views. Not surprisingly, the FSFE lawyer Carlo Piana recommended the use of the AGPLv3 licence. The FSFE Chair Karsten Gerloff highlighted that, as alternative or in addition, the developers might consider using the EUPL (which is open source and also accepted as a free software licence by the FSF). “This isn’t compatible with GPLv3 and opens a back door towards making future versions of the program proprietary again. But since the license is developed by the European Commission, it sometimes helps to overcome the fears of public-sector decision makers who are dipping their toe into the Free Software waters for the first time” he wrote[1].

It may be useful to moderate the above FSFE statements: It is true that the EUPL compatibility list, which was elaborated earlier, includes explicitly the GPLv2 but not yet the GPLv3. This could be done in the near future, hopefully: a draft is currently checked, adding also other new licences as the AGPLv3 in an updated version of the EUPL[2]. In the meantime, it is important to have in mind that the GPLv3 is already compatible indirectly (via the French CeCILL licence, as it is explained on the FSF web site http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#GPLIncompatibleLicenses ).

On the other point of “opening back doors”, Piana and Gerloff fears about the possibility of becoming proprietary seem unfounded: the EUPL is explicitly “share alike” on both code and binaries. It is only when combining the covered software with other open source components already covered by a compatible licence that this licence, which is always “share alike” at least on the source code, may cover the larger derivative (without relicensing of the original code that says covered by the EUPL).

The EUPL compatibility clause (part of article 5) seems clear:

“If the Licensee Distributes and/or Communicates Derivative Works or copies thereof based upon both the Original Work and another work  licensed under a Compatible Licence, this Distribution and/or Communication [NOTE: = this larger combined solution and not the original work taken alone] can be done under the terms of this Compatible Licence. For the sake of this clause, “Compatible Licence” refers to the licences listed in the appendix attached to this Licence.”

Therefore, in nearly five year EUPL distribution (version 1.0 of the licence was first published in January 2007) not a single case of derivative appropriation was reported by the users community.

Unfortunately and during this same period of time, some real cases of “GPL-ban” were reported: projects or public calls for tenders excluding software covered by the GPL family (all viral licences, as they formulated) and welcoming therefore much more permissive or even proprietary licences because of the fear that simple combination or linking would extend the licence coverage by a kind of “viral effect”[3]. Such ban cases, like the use of the term “viral” are unfortunate and - in our opinion - unjustified. It may even be that – under European law and jurisdictions – linking for interoperability reasons (i.e. reproducing APIs or data formats) does not require the authorisation of the licensor. However, to be honest, the fear that a simple “share alike” provision produces a “viral effect” has some foundations because of the FSF general assumption that linking create derivative, as clearly formulated in GPLv2 FAQs:
“You have a GPL'd program that I'd like to link with my code to build a proprietary program. Does the fact that I link with your program mean I have to GPL my program? - Yes.”

On this specific point, the EUPL approach, looks indeed “less-viral-and less-licence-centric” by making the distribution of larger/combined derivatives legally possible under a handful (explicitly listed) open source and share-alike licences.

All this to say that in both cases of single (i.e. EUPL or AGPLv3) or dual licensing (i.e. AGPLv3 and EUPL), the announcement of the AT4AM release is good news. We do not see serious risks of appropriation, at least on the covered AT4AM software. A pragmatic approach, which promotes interoperability between open source solutions and is more business friendly concerning combined derivatives,  may add more freedom for developers and looks a reasonable compromise minimizing undesirable side-impacts.