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
    31·
    1 day 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·
      14 hours 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.