We make licensing easy for humans and machines alike. REUSE solves a fundamental issue that Free Software licensing has at the very source. Adopting our recommendations is as easy as one-two-three!

This license was created to correspond to the requirements of the European Commission:

• The Licence should have equal legal value in all EU languages.
• The terminology regarding intellectual property rights had to be conformant with European law requirements.
• To be valid in all Member States, limitations of liability or warranty had to be precise, and not formulated “to the extend allowed by the law” as in most licences designed with the legal environment of the United States in mind.

The EUPL contains a unique compatibility clause and provides for a list of compatible copyleft licences, for example the GPL.

Although the potential users of European Institutions’ software are mostly other public sector administrations, there is nothing in the EUPL preventing its broader use. The EUPL could be used by anyone who holds the copyright to a piece of software. It could become – in various languages - an adequate legal interoperability instrument across Europe.

Oh I didn’t realize how good the ORC license actually is.

No more “this entire book is Product Identity”. The default is all crunch copylefted (strongly copylefted rather than permissive) and all fluff is reserved (proprietary😰). Licensors can designate some or all of the fluff as copylefted but they can’t proprietarize the crunch!

Software Maxims

Why Mercurial uses GPLv2 only