Martin Tournoi, the developer of GoatCounter, wrote an article explaining why he chose the EUPL licence for GoatCounter. It provides valuable insights and a useful comparison: https://www.arp242.net/license.html
I was curious about differences between EUPL and GPL Affero, I found the following:
> the EUPL could therefore be described as an “affero-like” licence (AGPLv3).
> The EUPL covers SaaS (Software as a Service): if an internet service provider modifies the licensed software to distribute online services (as Google does), this is “software distribution”.
Looks very interesting. It clarifies a lot of things that for example the GPL leaves unsaid, due to the different legal framework. And it is good that it explicitly calls out the legal jurisdiction it sits under (EU).
It's good that it has been written in multiple languages to aid acceptance across the EU.
What I like most of all is the listing of compatible licences.if I understand correctly this would enable you to combine GPL and EUPL software and publish the new software under the GPL. Would be nice to see reciprocation so the new software could also be published under the EUPL.
Once again, the EU coming 30 years later to do something everyone else is doing, and everyone will credit them for some odd reason.
In the 90s, there were dozens (hundreds?) of phone charging ports. A couple of years ago, there were only two. The dozens -> 2 simplifications occurred on the purely free market. And the EU mandated a simplification from 2 -> 1 and gets the credit for the entire simplification.
What is the point of this license? Either the GPL is invalid in the EU, in which case why aren't companies moving to the EU to infringe on the GPL? Or it is valid, in which case a a bunch of EU lawyers were given a bunch of MY money to do nothing of value to anyone.
It took them the entire first section to not mention that it is a _software license_.
In the context of EU regulating stuff, "a license" (at least to me) is not automatically assumed to be with regards to software distribution rights. I get that the naming makes it look similar to the (L)GPL and so on, but that could just be marketing and/or someone trying to associate with known things.
The first paragraph after the main title would have been better if it had a second sentence:
What is the EUPL?
EUPL is an acronym for "European Union Public Licence". It is a software distribution license.
That would (to me) have made it so much more clear, and avoided having to build up confusion while reading until the purpose was revealed.
I had to deal with it for work
a little bit and maybe my conclusions are useful to others, so here they are [1].
- EUPL is closely modeled after GPL. If you take away one thing then that: If you squint hard enough you will see GPL.
- In a sense it is closer to GPLv3.
It has explicit patent related terms. It lacks Tivozation and DRM provisions, so it is not a complete match.
- Beyond what is in the GPL the EUPL tries to be explicit when it comes to license compatibility. EUPL distinguishes between inbound and outbound compatibility and it is very important to be clear when speaking about this.
- Other Copyleft licenses (esp. GPL) are NOT inbound compatible with EUPL.
- GPL (v2 and v3) are outbound compatible besides some other explicitly listed licenses.
The last point is very strange and the biggest quirk in the otherwise pretty boring EUPL. The issue is this: EUPL has some additional restrictions that go beyond GPL. On the other side the GPL does not allow additional restrictions apart from certain precisely defined exceptions ("section 6").
The mechanism the EUPL has chosen to deal with this is that you are legally authorized to switch from EUPL to GPL, and after switching, all the stricter EUPL bits fall away.
[1] I am not a lawyer, consider my vantage being that of an EU startup, also opinions my own, not speaking for my employer.
EDIT: Skimming through the other comments I got the impression that many consider the EUPL closer to the AGPL. The reason I don't see it that way is the mentioned outbound GPL compatibility which renders the additional Affero provisions toothless.
EDIT 2: See bcye's comments which point out an interesting angle that might mean that my views regarding the AGPL issue may be too simplistic.
Perhaps someone else can clarify this, but I've been cautious about using this license instead of AGPLv3, because even though it includes this clause to close the SaaS loophole:
‘Distribution’ or ‘Communication’: any act of selling, giving, lending, renting, distributing, communicating, transmitting, or otherwise making available, online or offline, copies of the Work or providing access to its essential functionalities at the disposal of any other natural or legal person.
It still allows someone to relicense your work under GPL-2.0-only and GPL-3.0-only (amongst others):
‘Compatible Licences’ according to Article 5 EUPL are:
— GNU General Public License (GPL) v. 2, v. 3
Both these licenses have no such clause. Does this not make the attempt to close the SaaS loophole void?
edit: some words from the FSF
it gives recipients ways to relicense the work under the terms of other selected licenses, and some of those—the Eclipse Public License in particular—only provide a weaker copyleft. Thus, developers can't rely on this license to provide a strong copyleft.
AGPL or even GPL is fine. It's just a statement of intent: "artificial scarcity is bad, we want information to be free and those who take from the pile must add to it."
Realistically, open source licenses are legally powerless against corporations and governments, because they can hire more lawyers than you and rewrite the laws for themselves. We shouldn't play their game at all. The terms of open source licenses can be enforced socially. We can boycott, vote against, and shame violators. And we can be lenient towards other open source projects even if they use an incompatible license.
An AGPL-like license without the enmity that Stallman and GPL have.
IANAL, but I skimmed it and I see:
* a patent grant
* no extra clauses
* static/dynamic linking seems fine with compatible licenses (edit: unclear to me if proprietary can link (edit2: I find articles stating this is not viral and linking is always permitted, but there are section covering "essential functionality" in the license, so shim layers should not be allowed?))
* modifying for SaaS is redistributing
* clear list of compatible licenses (notably excluded: BSD/MIT/Apache)
* you can use both "this version" or "or later"
* trademarks not included
* no liability, except for "willful misconduct or damages directly caused to natural persons". Does not exclude from other law requirements.
Looks like it's a thing from 15-20 years ago. I've never come across this license in any project; so it doesn't look like it is widely used. It looks to me like this failed to get a lot of usage.
I was in an EU project around 2007-2008 via Nokia Research. No mention of this license. But at the time they did have a list of licenses that were OK for licensing software. License like GPL, Apache 2.0, etc.
If EUPL is the GPL v3 for EU, is there similar one for MIT/ BSD / Apache ?
I think I asked a question about this 10 years ago on HN about MIT / BSD like license that is worldwide accepted, I thought it was Public Domain. Turns out the concept of Public Domain isn't universal. I remember it was Germany or some other EU countries that doesn't have it.
But if GPL / MIT / BSD have been widely accepted for 20+ years worldwide now and counting. Why do we need another one?
A good step. Would love to see something like this OSI approved and globally used as a next generation reasonable license that protects the next generation of open source software companies.
What stands out is the focus on legal interoperability across the EU, not just code reuse. Makes sense for governments collaborating on digital infrastructure, though I imagine it's a nightmare for developers trying to navigate license compatibility in real-world projects
27 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 42.3 ms ] threadhttps://interoperable-europe.ec.europa.eu/collection/eupl/eu...
> the EUPL could therefore be described as an “affero-like” licence (AGPLv3).
> The EUPL covers SaaS (Software as a Service): if an internet service provider modifies the licensed software to distribute online services (as Google does), this is “software distribution”.
https://interoperable-europe.ec.europa.eu/collection/eupl/ne...
It's good that it has been written in multiple languages to aid acceptance across the EU.
What I like most of all is the listing of compatible licences.if I understand correctly this would enable you to combine GPL and EUPL software and publish the new software under the GPL. Would be nice to see reciprocation so the new software could also be published under the EUPL.
In the 90s, there were dozens (hundreds?) of phone charging ports. A couple of years ago, there were only two. The dozens -> 2 simplifications occurred on the purely free market. And the EU mandated a simplification from 2 -> 1 and gets the credit for the entire simplification.
What is the point of this license? Either the GPL is invalid in the EU, in which case why aren't companies moving to the EU to infringe on the GPL? Or it is valid, in which case a a bunch of EU lawyers were given a bunch of MY money to do nothing of value to anyone.
In the context of EU regulating stuff, "a license" (at least to me) is not automatically assumed to be with regards to software distribution rights. I get that the naming makes it look similar to the (L)GPL and so on, but that could just be marketing and/or someone trying to associate with known things.
The first paragraph after the main title would have been better if it had a second sentence:
That would (to me) have made it so much more clear, and avoided having to build up confusion while reading until the purpose was revealed.> This website is not sponsored or endorsed by the European Commission or any other institution, body or agency of the European Union.
- EUPL is closely modeled after GPL. If you take away one thing then that: If you squint hard enough you will see GPL.
- In a sense it is closer to GPLv3. It has explicit patent related terms. It lacks Tivozation and DRM provisions, so it is not a complete match.
- Beyond what is in the GPL the EUPL tries to be explicit when it comes to license compatibility. EUPL distinguishes between inbound and outbound compatibility and it is very important to be clear when speaking about this.
- Other Copyleft licenses (esp. GPL) are NOT inbound compatible with EUPL.
- GPL (v2 and v3) are outbound compatible besides some other explicitly listed licenses.
The last point is very strange and the biggest quirk in the otherwise pretty boring EUPL. The issue is this: EUPL has some additional restrictions that go beyond GPL. On the other side the GPL does not allow additional restrictions apart from certain precisely defined exceptions ("section 6").
The mechanism the EUPL has chosen to deal with this is that you are legally authorized to switch from EUPL to GPL, and after switching, all the stricter EUPL bits fall away.
[1] I am not a lawyer, consider my vantage being that of an EU startup, also opinions my own, not speaking for my employer.
EDIT: Skimming through the other comments I got the impression that many consider the EUPL closer to the AGPL. The reason I don't see it that way is the mentioned outbound GPL compatibility which renders the additional Affero provisions toothless.
EDIT 2: See bcye's comments which point out an interesting angle that might mean that my views regarding the AGPL issue may be too simplistic.
edit: some words from the FSF
https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html#EUPL-1.2To me, this seems very poorly thought out. I see no reason to use this license over AGPL (or even GPL).
Realistically, open source licenses are legally powerless against corporations and governments, because they can hire more lawyers than you and rewrite the laws for themselves. We shouldn't play their game at all. The terms of open source licenses can be enforced socially. We can boycott, vote against, and shame violators. And we can be lenient towards other open source projects even if they use an incompatible license.
An AGPL-like license without the enmity that Stallman and GPL have.
IANAL, but I skimmed it and I see:
* a patent grant
* no extra clauses
* static/dynamic linking seems fine with compatible licenses (edit: unclear to me if proprietary can link (edit2: I find articles stating this is not viral and linking is always permitted, but there are section covering "essential functionality" in the license, so shim layers should not be allowed?))
* modifying for SaaS is redistributing
* clear list of compatible licenses (notably excluded: BSD/MIT/Apache)
* you can use both "this version" or "or later"
* trademarks not included
* no liability, except for "willful misconduct or damages directly caused to natural persons". Does not exclude from other law requirements.
Visually: https://interoperable-europe.ec.europa.eu/collection/eupl/li...
Matrix of licenses: https://interoperable-europe.ec.europa.eu/collection/eupl/ma...
I was in an EU project around 2007-2008 via Nokia Research. No mention of this license. But at the time they did have a list of licenses that were OK for licensing software. License like GPL, Apache 2.0, etc.
I imagine that many missiles, drones and other such devices use free software. I wouldn't want any of my software to be part of these weapons.
I think I asked a question about this 10 years ago on HN about MIT / BSD like license that is worldwide accepted, I thought it was Public Domain. Turns out the concept of Public Domain isn't universal. I remember it was Germany or some other EU countries that doesn't have it.
But if GPL / MIT / BSD have been widely accepted for 20+ years worldwide now and counting. Why do we need another one?
[0] : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_Public_Licence
[1] : https://interoperable-europe.ec.europa.eu/collection/eupl
[2] : https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/sites/default/files/custom-page/...