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.

  • KullumDaue@lemmy.world
    44·
    3 days 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
      52·
      2 days 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.

      Now, to answer “why should they pay them”, well, in exchange for their labor.

      • KullumDaue@lemmy.world
        22·
        2 days 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.
        • Cyclohexane@lemmy.mlMEnglish
          1·
          2 days ago

          You’re using “open source” as defined by OSI. Just wanted to note that open source historically arose in protest to the corporate walled gardens that dominated the software ecosystem, rather than a movement to give companies a large eco-system of free-to-use software for profit. It was about individuals having access.

          But I am not going to argue that what I am proposing is open source. I will accept that open source as a term has already been coopted to serve corporations.

          forces you to share the code, even when it is not deployed

          It would only apply to for-profit entities. It would be extremely difficult to enforce on an individual level anyways, and it would disagree with the spirit here.

          forces you to pay a tithe to the developer.

          I called that profit sharing earlier, but you can call it that too, sure.

    • Laurel Raven@lemmy.zipEnglish
      4·
      3 days 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

        • Laurel Raven@lemmy.zipEnglish
          1·
          20 hours ago

          Not sure why you’d think that, I’m agreeing with you, though I’m referencing context from the post you were replying to… We can’t have free software while demanding it be denied to some, that’s the very antithesis of “free” (as in freedom). OOP seems to think companies should be denied access to software that was developed and distributed freely when that was literally the intent those developers had when they placed a free license on it. You seemed to disagree, and I was adding to that… At least that was my intent, if it didn’t come across that way then I apologize