EUPL
More info
- Creator
- European Commission
- Released
- 2007
- Type
- Copyleft licence
- Website
- interoperable-europe.ec.europa.eu
The EU's own copyleft licence, legally valid in 23 languages and written around European copyright law rather than American.
The European Commission drew up the European Union Public Licence in 2007 so it could release its own software. The trouble with the GPL wasn't its substance but that it was drafted with US law in mind and exists in only one official English version. The EUPL has 23 language versions of equal standing and points to the law of the licensor's country. The current version, 1.2, dates from 2017.
It is copyleft with an unusual escape hatch: a list of compatible licences – including the GPL, AGPL, LGPL and MPL – under which a combined work may be released. It also covers making the software available over a network, much like the AGPL. Public bodies in several EU countries use it; outside the public sector it's a rarity, the usual fate of a licence that solves a problem few private developers know they have.