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.

  • yetAnotherUser@discuss.tchncs.de
    2·
    2 hours ago

    Public domain is a thing in the EU but not releasing anything into public domain.

    In Germany, I cannot renounce my copyright to anything. I can give you an indefinite, unrestricted license to do whatever but I still own the copyright. It will only ever become public domain 70 years after my death, not a day sooner or later.

    • lemmyvore@feddit.nlEnglish
      1·
      22 minutes ago

      I can give you an indefinite, unrestricted license to do whatever but I still own the copyright.

      Isn’t this distinction academic?