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Comment by dotancohen | Hacker News Reader

This article would do better if it simply enumerated the problems with the LGPL and addressed how this new license which I've never heard of addresses those problems. This hinting and alluding might make great SEO, but that's fit for neither the audience of people producing software, nor for HN.

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Here's the license text if someone wants to do the work: https://spdx.org/licenses/EUPL-1.2.html#licenseText

This is the actual license text, in English: https://interoperable-europe.ec.europa.eu/sites/default/file...

Other languages can be found here: https://interoperable-europe.ec.europa.eu/collection/eupl/eu...

I do appreciate the link to the article and came via HN. I don’t think you can speak for either the audience of people producing software nor for HN.

Another article comparing LGPL and this license sounds good and I am interested in that as well. This article though is a good nudge to start thinking about licensing.

The article seems pretty clear that the LGPL is too weak compared to the EUPL for this author, and one of the main concerns is the "SaaS loophole" which I assume would be addressed by the AGPL but also seems addressed by the EUPL.

But the EUPL itself says that derivative works may be distributed under the LGPL instead, as long as those works are derived from both a EUPL and LGPL parent. This seems kinda trivial to abuse and the author should have noticed this clause if that was their main concern.

Huh, that's a pretty massive loophole. Pretty much makes the whole license irrelevant.

The EUPL obligations still apply, unless they specifically conflict with the other license. There is some dispute on how exactly that is to be interpreted, but hopefully it will be clarified in version 1.3: https://interoperable-europe.ec.europa.eu/collection/eupl/di...

A “conflict” here is intended to mean that following some EUPL obligation (such as publishing the derived source code) wouldn’t be allowed under the alternative license.

I don't understand how that's supposed to work - then you can't distribute under the compatible license; only under a weird hybrid of that license and non-conflicting EUPL terms. Seems to defeat the purpose of the compatibility clause?

Yes, I agree, it’s unclear how the EUPL requirements would propagate for a composite work that gets relicensed under the compatible license, without changing the latter.

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