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I Changed My License

2026-09-06 | original
read original get Understanding Open Source and Free Software Licensing" (O'Reilly) → more articles
Why This Matters

A veteran developer with 28 years of publishing software explains his move from LGPL and MIT to the EU's EUPL-1.2, a strong copyleft license that closes the SaaS loophole. It's a concrete example of a broader developer backlash against permissive licensing, which many now argue mainly subsidized large corporations rather than benefiting users or maintainers. For companies relying on open source, it signals rising licensing friction and more attention to EU-originated legal frameworks.

Key Takeaways
Worth a Look

Understanding Open Source and Free Software Licensing" (O'Reilly) — If this developer's journey from LGPL to MIT to EUPL-1.2 sparked your curiosity, this O'Reilly guide walks through how the major free software licenses actually work and how copyleft obligations differ. It's a handy desk reference for anyone choosing a default license for their own projects.

See Understanding Open Source and Free Software Licensing" (O'Reilly) on Amazon → Affiliate link — we may earn a commission on purchases, at no extra cost to you. Product picked by AI based on this article; it is not a tested recommendation.

In the last 28 years of publishing software, I’ve had three distinct eras of software licensing. All of my recent stuff is available under the European Union Public License 1.2, and I thought to explain why.

Midgard was all LGPLv2. This was a simpler time, and there weren’t that many free software licenses around. Since Midgard was a web framework, using a weak copyleft license felt like the right thing to do. The example website shipping with Midgard was X11 licensed.

When I started working more seriously with JavaScript around 2011, I switched to the MIT license. This was a “do whatever you like, just don’t sue me” sort of a simple affair favored by the NPM package ecosystem. Easy interoperability, no hooks attached.

After we closed Flowhub, there were a few years of hiatus where I published almost no software. Either because it wasn’t feasible due to my work situation, or because I was busy with the boat.

Enter EUPL

This year I decided to switch my “default license” to EUPL-1.2. This is an OSI-approved free software license created and published by the European Union. And it is quite a divergence from the licenses I’ve used in the past. EUPL is a strong copyleft license that closes the “SaaS loophole” by requiring reciprocal licensing regardless of how the software is distributed.

Over the years it has been clear that we in the “open source” camp (as opposed to the “free software” camp) were wrong all along. We won the debate, and gained little for users or developers. All that our efforts did was to make it easier for big corporations build things more cheaply and for billionaires to become trillionaires.

And so it is time to stop messing about with permissive licenses. If corporations don’t want to use our software under our terms, they are free to spend the effort or tokens to build their own.

The fact that EUPL has legally valid official translations to 23 languages also doesn’t hurt in a world where most of software is built and used in the wider world outside of the Valley.

Here are some things I’ve already published under EUPL:

... continue reading

Explore topics: eupl-1.2 midgard mit license lgplv2 copyleft
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