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Comment by brudgers | Hacker News Reader

There are two meaningful difference between licenses.

One is the size of the pile of money you are willing to pay lawyers to enforce it. Because there is no software license enforcement agency that is going to sue neerdowells on your behalf.

The other is excluding good actors who don't want to deal with it. Obscure licenses increase the number of good actors who will forego using the software because parsing non-standard licenses is work and raises questions about the competence and/or motives of the developer.

Obscure licenses don't protect users. Good luck.

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If I understand you correctly, your advice is that EUPL is an unknown/obscure license and you would not choose it for that reason?

Thanks for the good luck wishes, but I don't intend to throw money towards enforcing the license at all. I mostly don't want to be liable for code that I open source.

And restricting it to EU would solve the problem that e.g. WTFPL or UNLICENSE have with countries that don't acknowledge public domain.

This is more a question out of curiosity for me, and many people react allergic to viral licenses, GNU or RMS so I was looking for alternatives because I also heard there were issues with CC-share-alike.

I would not choose it for two reasons:

1. The bad actor case: On my side of the equation there is no practical difference between licenses. Enforcing one or the other has the same legal costs…either I lawyer up and enforce whatever license I used or I don’t.

2. The good actor case: When users are unfamiliar with a license they are less likely to use it (or in a business context less likely to be allowed to use it).

By the way, CC-0 is an alternative to the public domain.

> 2. The good actor case: When users are unfamiliar with a license they are less likely to use it (or in a business context less likely to be allowed to use it).

Businesses typically don't want copyleft because they don't want to share anything (even if that is counter-productive). If more codebases used copyleft, I'm convinced that more businesses would know how to deal with it.

My second thought here is that I don't like this "people won't use is" blackmail. I write software that I share for free, I am entitled to choose under which conditions you can use it. If you can't be arsed to spend the time needed to understand my conditions (and the EUPL is not exactly a 200-pages long license), then don't use it. It's not like you were going to pay me anyway, right?

I am telling you why I wouldn't use an obscure license if I wanted to share my work.

When I don't want to share my work, I simply keep my work to myself.

You are indeed free to choose whatever license you want.

I have zero issues with that.

Sorry, I didn't want to sound aggressive at all :-). Of course that's your choice. I was just sharing my preference.

In my experience, many developers tend to prefer the licenses that are better for their company. And I don't get that. They should prefer the licenses that are better for themselves. If my company is forced to use a GPL library because there is no alternative, then I get to open source my code. That's great for me personally! Conversely, if I get to publish code I wrote in my company, if I manage to do it under a copyleft license, it helps other developers open source their code.

I understand that GPL/LGPL maybe scary in some situations (how do you deal with LGPL in a proprietary iOS app?), but I haven't found a single example where MPLv2 doesn't work. I don't see a reason to use a permissive license, MPLv2 is always fine.

As a developer, it's never good for me to help a company get permissive code for free.

Can't we reasonably assume that an official European license is not exactly "obscure"?

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