On the EUPL

[Georg C. F. Greve]

Dear Patrice-Emmanuel Schmitz,

Of course I have heard about you and your personal involvement in the
European Public License. So please forgive me if my comments upon an
earlier draft of the EUPL have offended you. I hope you understood that
my comment was the result of direct solicitation.

From a quick glance at EUPL version 1.1 it now seems that the license
has been greatly improved since that first draft I saw. Congratulations!

Although FSFE's legal department would require a bit more time for
thorough analysis, the license now looks like a Free Software Copyleft
license that is expressedly compatible to the old version of the GNU
General Public License (GPL). For future improvement it would be good if
compatibility to the current version of the GNU GPL were also added.

Otherwise version 1.1 seems to have solved the issue that existed with
paragraph 13 of version 1.0, and while license proliferation [1] is
always a concern, the Compatibility clause in paragraph 5 seems to have
addressed it sufficiently through explicit compatibility and the ability
to relicense.

So from a first look it seems to me that the EUPL is now fit for its
intended use as a license catering to the specific political needs of
European public administration and it will help to foster growth of the
European Free Software ecosystem.

I'm sure you'll understand that this is a tentative analysis, pending a
more thorough one by the legal departments of our sister organisation
and FSFE itself, but maybe this quick response is already helpful.

My commendation on the work that has been done on the EUPL,

With best regards,
Georg Greve


[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/License_proliferation

-- 
Georg C. F. Greve                                 <greve at fsfeurope.org>
Free Software Foundation Europe	                 (http://fsfeurope.org)
President                                      +41 43 500 03 66 ext 400

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