On the EUPL

Ben Finney ben at benfinney.id.au
Mon Jul 25 13:22:36 UTC 2005


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.

-- 
 \       "My classmates would copulate with anything that moved, but I |
  `\            never saw any reason to limit myself."  -- Emo Philips |
_o__)                                                                  |
Ben Finney <ben at benfinney.id.au>
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