After 28 years, I'm switching my open source license to EUPL
I Changed My License
Henri Bergius reflects on three eras of licensing his software, from LGPL to MIT to now EUPL-1.2. He argues that permissive licenses have enabled big corporations to profit without giving back, and that strong copyleft licenses like EUPL close the SaaS loophole. His recent projects, including a JavaScript implementation of Reticulum and a decentralized authorization system, are now under EUPL.
All that our efforts did was to make it easier for big corporations build things more cheaply and for billionaires to become trillionaires.
- apt-get
Worth noting that the "escape hatch" clauses in the EUPL that allow converting it into other licenses mean it's only ever as strong as the weakest license it names for such an operation, AKA EPL/MPL/LGPL.
Any actor that wants to mess around with providing a closed extension on a network service can exercise that option with an EUPL codebase, so if you care about that, you're better off explicitly naming the AGPL or whatnot.
EUPL is built for government agencies first, and most of the focus is ensuring that nobody has to worry about mix-and-matching it with other copyleft licenses, plus legal language that covers and harmonizes variations in notions of copyright/patents/intellectual property across EU countries, not so much waging war against hyperscalers. (But it's still great to have around!)
- dotancohen
This article would do better if it simply enumerated the problems with the LGPL and addressed how this new license which I've never heard of addresses those problems. This hinting and alluding might make great SEO, but that's fit for neither the audience of people producing software, nor for HN.
- mnahkies
What are people's thoughts/experiences about dual licencing?
Eg: is there a clean way to dual license such that hobbyist, and exploratory work (eg: a proof of concept done in a commercial setting) are allowed, but using it in production requires a fee?
If you've done this, has it been successful? Obviously there's been many projects relicense over recent years (terraform, redis, etc) - but it's less clear to me if this is a viable path for new projects starting out, or if it just kills adoption from the beginning.
- kzrdude
Using EUPL is mostly a way to signal that you want to use a license grounded in EU law, not in US law. That's at least the way I've looked at it.
- lukan
"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."
Did anyone ever claimed, open source was a way to get super rich in money?
It was always about access to source, to study, to tinker, to improve upon. We now have huge ressources of open source software to learn from - indeed a win I say.
And it is not clear at all to me, that the alternative timeline would have been any better, if FOSS and a strong copyleft would have won as developers choice and standard - I rather would expect it to be way more niche - and trillionaires would be as rich as ever.
- alturp
> "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."
Claiming this and afterwards deciding to use a weak copy left license like EUPL (which can be integrated with proprietary software without disclosing source code) instead of AGPLv3, which really closes SaaS loop is a bit lost to me.
- Daegalus
https://github.com/daegalus/daegalus/blob/main/licensing-phi...
I created something like this on my github and then i relicensed what i could that was purely mine, and kept other stuff unchanged and only used those licenses as default going forward mostly.
I chose EUPL also for pure AGPL style OSS work. and I plan to use other licenses as needed.
- Cider9986
Best license: