Hi all,
I have seen that several people asked about the EUPL and FSFE's position on it on this list. My apologies for not responding earlier, the WIPO activities last week kept me quite busy. [*]
About the EUPL, I am sure you will understand that this is politically sensitive, but the following sums up our position on the issue:
We welcome the interest of the European Commission in Free Software, which we have always supported as much as we could -- both politically and by our participation in the framework programmes.
Generally, writing new licenses for Free Software is a well-meaning, but ill-advised activity that usually diminishes the usefulness of the software released under it, in the worst case to the point of becoming useless: This is in particular true when they end up being GPL incompatible and thus cannot intercombine with the vast majority of Free Software that already exists.
The last version of the EUPL we were presented with was a copyleft, GPL incompatible Free Software license. We are therefore sceptical about its usefulness and would rather propose to cooperate on the further evolution of the GNU General Public License (GPL) for which the FSFE would be the European contact point and will gladly work with the Commission.
Hope this helps.
Regards, Georg
[*] See https://www.fsfe.org/Members/gerloff/blog/