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.

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.

  • HaraldvonBlauzahn@feddit.orgOP
    9·
    13 hours ago

    Everybody can build whatever they want.

    I do not see how that adresses his core argument - that permissive licenses enabled things we do not want and which subvert individual and collective freedoms.

    More to the point, the GPL and its sisters are designed to grant rights to people.

    While the “everybody” in your sentence above includes corporations like Microsoft, Facebook and Anthropic which do very unfree things with open source tools.

    This is not the same intent.

    • plyth@feddit.orgEnglish
      2·
      13 hours ago

      I do not see how that adresses his core argument

      It doesn’t, as I wrote in my first sentence. Free software alone is just nice enough that it is more than a little gain.

      • HaraldvonBlauzahn@feddit.orgOP
        1·
        12 hours ago

        So, your argument is merely that the point he blogs about does not matter? Or do you somehow not want people to discuss it? Why?

        • plyth@feddit.orgEnglish
          2·
          12 hours ago

          So, your argument is merely that the point he blogs about does not matter?

          No

          Or do you somehow not want people to discuss it?

          No

          I wrote that I don’t want to invalidate his points. I think they are valid.

          All that our efforts did

          That statement is just too strong.