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/
On 25-Jul-2005, Georg C. F. Greve wrote:
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.
This was my first concern when I saw the announcement. They referred to "an in-depth analysis of existing licenses", but I have seen no evidence they are even aware of the strong message from both FSF and OSI that creating new licenses is usually inferior to choosing an existing, well-understood recommended one.
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.
Thanks for taking this on, Georg. Here's hoping license proliferation can be prevented in this important case; your efforts in that direction are appreciated.
On Mon, 2005-07-25 at 23:22 +1000, Ben Finney wrote:
This was my first concern when I saw the announcement. They referred to "an in-depth analysis of existing licenses", but I have seen no evidence they are even aware of the strong message from both FSF and OSI that creating new licenses is usually inferior to choosing an existing, well-understood recommended one.
It looks like that "in-depth" analysis couldn't be anything but a few google searches leading into one too-many GPL vs BSD flame wars. So in order to avoid choosing a side, the decision would be to create a new one.
Absurd, but seems to me the most likely case.
Rui
Rui Miguel Seabra rms@1407.org writes:
It looks like that "in-depth" analysis couldn't be anything but a few google searches leading into one too-many GPL vs BSD flame wars. So in order to avoid choosing a side, the decision would be to create a new one.
Here's an explanatory document from the authors of the license: http://europa.eu.int/idabc/servlets/Doc?id=21197
On Thu, 2005-07-28 at 01:50 +0100, Ciaran O'Riordan wrote:
Rui Miguel Seabra rms@1407.org writes:
It looks like that "in-depth" analysis couldn't be anything but a few google searches leading into one too-many GPL vs BSD flame wars. So in order to avoid choosing a side, the decision would be to create a new one.
Here's an explanatory document from the authors of the license: http://europa.eu.int/idabc/servlets/Doc?id=21197
From it, here's their evaluation of why the GNU GPL isn't suitable:
The GPL's major problem is that the right of communication to the public is not provided explicitly amongst the granted rights, and that a clause limits furthermore the granted rights to what is explicitly provided by the license. Moreover, the GPL is known for being the most viral license ever, whereas massive spreading through dynamic linkage is not the aim of the European Commission.
Yes, I know.
* right of communication to the public -> absurd, reveals license wasn't even read * most viral license ever -> google search a-like conclusion * linkage forcing -> why resume to one license? If that's the problem there's always the Lesser GPL (although I'd prefer GPL all the way) -> again, google search a-like conclusion
It's what it looks like.
Rui