I Changed My License
A software developer explains their decision to switch their project licenses to the European Union Public License (EUPL-1.2). The author argues that permissive licenses have primarily benefited large corporations and that stronger copyleft terms are necessary to protect developers.
Why it matters
This reflects a growing trend among independent developers to move away from permissive open-source models toward restrictive licenses to prevent corporate exploitation.
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.
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