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Comment by marc136 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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