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.

  • Cyclohexane@lemmy.mlMEnglish
    122·
    22 hours ago

    Not good enough. Companies are still allowed to use this software freely, make massive profits without anything going to the developer. It is truly free labor.

    They are even allowed to modify it, even make derivative work, without open sourcing it, as long as they don’t distribute said derivative work.

      • Cyclohexane@lemmy.mlMEnglish
        3·
        17 hours ago

        I haven’t looked into it, but I will. My only worry is that it will discourage many people from it due to political biases against the naming.

    • KullumDaue@lemmy.world
      44·
      21 hours ago

      They are even allowed to modify it, even make derivative work, without open sourcing it, as long as they don’t distribute said derivative work.

      i am not a lawyer, but isn’t that similar to gpl?

      also, why should the company’s profit go to a developer they don’t employ?

      • Cyclohexane@lemmy.mlMEnglish
        41·
        9 hours ago

        isn’t that similar to gpl?

        That is correct. GPL has the same problem.

        why should the company’s profit go to a developer they don’t employ?

        I dont agree with the idea that paying non-employees is a foreign concept. Many companies pay, for example, Adobe for Adobe suite software, or Google for Google suite software, despite not hiring them as employees. They pay rent to property owners despite not hiring them as employees. The idea that only employees must be paid is unfounded.

        • KullumDaue@lemmy.world
          21·
          6 hours ago

          open source is free, as in freedom. you want an open source license that:

          1. forces you to share the code, even when it is not deployed (playing around at coding? share everything, to whom? don’t care, share you mfker!!!).
          2. forces you to pay a tithe to the developer.
      • Laurel Raven@lemmy.zipEnglish
        4·
        18 hours ago

        And who literally gave the work away without asking for payment, for anyone to use freely?

        Like, do we want free software or not? We can’t have it both ways