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.

  • Daniel Quinn@lemmy.caEnglish
    7·
    3 hours ago

    I understand why you’d want to avoid MIT, but as someone who generally favours the AGPL for everything I do, I’m curious why you opted for the EUPL instead.

  • HaraldvonBlauzahn@feddit.orgOP
    161·
    5 hours ago

    Personally, I also think that much of the hate which one would find e.g. on reddit or the orange site against copyleft licenses in general, and the GPL specifically was probably astroturfing from corporations for which it was just an obstacle to appropiate more unpaid volunteer work for the commons for free.

    For the Linux kernel - and for GNU/Linux as an OS - the GPL was never a problem. On the contrary: Without it, the kernel would not be what it is (the historic Torvalds - Tanenbaum debate shows the reasons quite clearly).

    The same is true, by the way for the GNU Guix project: Very few arguments against it are logical or really hold water. It is, for example, perfectly possile to publish a Guix channel for a commercial game or proprietary software on ones own web site - just as you can do with a docker image. And the way Guix takes care of dependencies and updates makes it probably the easiest way to do such. Because you can use Guix as a package manager on most distros - I use it both on Debian and Arch - I find it more reasonable than using snaps, docker, or flatpaks.

    The reason for the hate is likely something else: That you can’t commercialise and embrace the whole, source-based ecosystem.

    For example, you can’t use the Guix infrastructure (e.g. their mailing list or download server) to promote or advertise commercial, non-free stuff. But expecting or demanding to be able to do that is just ridiculous: Nobody expects from Microsoft or Apple that they feel obliged to promote or market Adobe or Oracle products. Alone the idea that companies could demand that shows how entitled the corporations behave in respect to free software.

  • raspberriesareyummy@lemmy.world
    46·
    4 hours ago

    What a shitty choice of a license. Typical EU legal garbage full of duplications and “lawyers” thinking “more is better”.

    Also:

    The provisions of this Licence can be accepted by clicking on an icon ‘I agree’ placed under the bottom of a window displaying the text of this Licence or by affirming consent in any other similar way, in accordance with the rules of applicable law. Clicking on that icon indicates your clear and irrevocable acceptance of this Licence and all of its terms and conditions.

    Lol, these morons. Of course the EU pencil pushers would hyperfixate on “clicking a button”.

    /a European