On the EUPL

[Georg C. F. Greve]

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/

-- 
Georg C. F. Greve                                 <greve at fsfeurope.org>
Free Software Foundation Europe	                 (http://fsfeurope.org)
Join the Fellowship and protect your freedom!     (http://www.fsfe.org)
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