EUPL
How Many Open Source Licenses Do You Need?
I comment here a recent article of Bruce Perens
In a recent article (19 feb 2009)
Bruce Perens questions the growing number of open source licences. To make things short, he would be satisfied with four of them:
- a “gift” BSD like licence: the Apache 2.0
- a “Share with (strong copyleft) rules”: the GPLv3
- a licence “in between”: the LGPLv3
- a licence that considers the SaaS distribution: the Affero GPLv3
To facilitate your understanding of these complex licensing texts, the above selection is even simpler: you have only two licenses to study (because LGPLv3 and Affero GPLv3 are variations from the GPLv3 text).
And the EUPL? (one of the reviewers named Haakon asked…)
Bruce did not answer in too much details:
The main remaining problem I have with EUPL 1.1,he said, is this text:
“In case of any Distribution and/or Communication of the Work by means of electronic communication by You (for example, by offering to download the Work from a remote location) the distribution channel or media (for example, a website) must at least provide to the public the information requested by the applicable law regarding the Licensor, the Licence and the way it may be accessible, concluded, stored and reproduced by the Licensee.”
This is a lot better than the previous version (Bruce said), but “I don't even understand how to "conclude" software. I am also curious regarding who will continue development of EUPL since IDABC is supposedly being ended as a European project”.
How to comment the above?
According to the text of the EUPL (this is article 11. Information to the public), you do not "conclude" software. You conclude a license agreement: a license is seen as a contract between the recipient and the licensor (including the community of contributors if any). This EUPL provision does not create specific obligations, as it sends back to the applicable law - which is clearly indicated by article 15 of the EUPL: in any case it is the law of a Member State of the European Union. Based on the EUPL preliminary studies, I believe that for Professor Severine Dusollier (CRID, Namur) this provision reminds that EU directives (and therefore all Member States laws) have specific constraints regarding the information that is to communicate to the consumers. Such obligations are not resulting from the EUPL but from the applicable law.
The second comment from Bruce is a little bit to classify in the “FUD” category (Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt): He fear the the EUPL will stop with the IDABC programme (at the end of 2009). The adoption of the EUPL by the European Commission (the college of Commissioners) does not make the license depending on the continuation of the IDABC programme. Even if the licence can be considered as “historically produced under the IDABC programme”, it exists now independently of this programme.
While the IDABC programme ends in December 2009, it is known that the next programme (ISA with comparable objectives from 2010 to 2015) is currently prepared.
Last, and this is the most important, it seems to me that Bruce (I have much respect for him in consideration of his role in the Open Source movement) is missing one of the principal innovation of the EUPL: the license exists in 22 linguistic versions and all versions have equal value. This is unique and would be enough to establish the utility of the EUPL.
At CeBIT Open Source 2009, Martin Michlmayer, past Debian project head, presented his current industry oriented projects FOSSology and FOSSBazaar, and responded to the questions of Britta Wuelfing (interview in Linux Magazine Online - LMO) about the suggestion to limit choice to three licenses: "Whether to limit things realistically to three licenses is a good question," Martin said. "But I feel that everyone involved in this is agreed certainly on limiting them. That's why careful thought is given to new licenses and if they should be distributed. There are obviously vanity factors involved when a license happens to bear the name of its issuer. But one new license is bound to be of true value in the near future: the EUPL [European Union Public License]. For the first time we'd have a license available in all European languages and valid everywhere, that is, all translations have been legally scrutinized. Also of practical value is that EUPL code can be converted to GPL code", he said. When can we expect to see OSI approval of the EUPL? LMO asked. Michlmayr: We can't give an exact date, but it's bound to happen soon.
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