Constitutional affairs legal affairs

Workshop: Legal aspects of free and open source software 
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7.
 
“Case law compatible” approach of warranty and liability (a general exclusion of liability 
is not valid facing European courts); 
8.
 
Not too long, not too complex, comprehensive and pragmatic. 
During the EUPL elaboration in 2006, no existing licence was found to correspond to at 
least four key requirements (N° 3, 4, 6 and 7).  
Therefore, the decision of writing the EUPL was taken. The EUPL is not a « Vanity licence » 
(where the main motivation of the author is just to forge « its own » licence and attach its 
name to it): it answers to a number of real issues, starting from the fact that governments 
and public sector organisations in general are often legally obliged to use legal instruments 
with a working value in their local language (N° 3). 
This point is too often misunderstood by developers, especially in the US (but not only!): 
English is the developers’ lingua franca and they consider as strange, not to say "totally 
irrelevant" (not to use any stronger terms!), any request by licensors or recipients to obtain 
working translations in another language. 
At least three additional points were also very important to clarify (N°4, 6, 7): terminology, 
applicable law / competent court, warranty and liability. 
Other points are not unique to the EUPL, even if the coverage of SaaS is still a rarity (the 
GNU Affero General Public License built on the GPL v3 presents similar characteristics on 
this specific point). Some licences (in particular the very permissive ones, like the BSD or 
the MIT) are much shorter, but it is commonly acknowledged that the EUPL is concise and 
comprehensive compared with some other “copyleft” licences. 
1.2.
 
EUPL History 
The EUPL has an already long story, responding to the question: how to distribute and 
share European Institutions’ software? 
However, the wide use of the EUPL started in 2009, when the licence was translated in 22 
linguistic versions and received approval from the Open Source Initiative (OSI). 
Here is a rough timetable of the EUPL history:  

 
2001-2005 - “How to distribute EC software?” 

 
2005 -  Public consultation - Decision to create the EUPL 

 
2006 - Study (CRID) for making the EUPL interoperable  

 
2007 (January) - EUPL v1.0 approved by EC Commissioners 

 
2008 - Elaboration of 22 linguistic « working versions » 

 
2009 - EUPL v1.1 approved by EC Commissioners 

 
2009 (March) - EUPL v1.1 certified by OSI.org 

 
by end 2012 - More than 500 projects distributed  

 
2013 - Public consultation on the EUPL v1.2 (December 2012– March 2013) 

 
2013 - final draft EUPL v1.2 published (probably in June or July, depending on 
translation and approval by the College of Commissioners). 
1.3.
 
Who wrote the EUPL? 
In addition to the public consultation, which provided substantial improvements, about 50 
persons contributed to the writing of the EUPL. The work from the original team was 
complemented by contributions from IPR lawyers from 22 Member States. 
 

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Policy Department C: Citizens' Rights and Constitutional Affairs 
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Figure 1 List of EUPL contributors 
 
1.4.
 
EUPL impact and licence proliferation 
In the early days of free/open source software (until the year 2000) the GPL v2 licence and 
its LGPL “library” variant were adopted by some 90% of all FOSS projects. 
Since then, the number and the frequency of use of other licences have increased strongly. 
The GPLv3 and AGPLv3 introduced in 2007 have not replaced the previous GPLv2, which 
still seems to be the most used licence (i.e. by Linux). Some important business projects 
are driven by foundations (Apache, Mozilla etc.) promoting other FOSS licences. Such 
licence proliferation may be considered as unfortunate, because it has made the work of 
developers more complex, but it looks a definitive fact: nearly every day or week, new 
licences are drafted, and the task of “OSI licence reviewers” seems endless. 
To compensate the issue of licence proliferation, EUPL has chosen the way of 
interoperability (see section 4). The EUPL inspires also other governments (i.e. Quebec in 
Canada), which have requested to modify the EUPL for using it as template for their own 
needs. In such case, maintaining the same list of compatible licences may strongly reduce 
the impact of licence proliferation. 
Similarly, the new (2013) version 2.1 of the CeCILL licence (used by French administration) 
includes now the EUPL and the GPL as downstream compatible licences, which looks 
positive for developers from both communities. 
During the last months, the use of the EUPL for licensing projects was strongly growing. A 
November 2012 evaluation counted about 500 projects (some of them with up to 100 
licensed files), and new projects are published every week. The European Parliament has 
selected the EUPL for the distribution of its first large FOSS project, AT4AM
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. 
1.5.
 
The EUPL used as a “reference” 
Another interest of the EUPL is to be part of the European Interoperability Framework (EIF) 
and to be used as a reference, especially in public software requirements and procurement 
agreements
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. In line with the EU ministerial declarations on the opportunity to reduce 
                                                 
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http://www.at4am.org/eupl/
  
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 See the Guide for the procurement of standard-based ICT / Elements of Good Practice – (European Economics 
23 March 2012) - 
http://cordis.europa.eu/fp7/ict/ssai/docs/study-action23/d3-guidelines-finaldraft2012-03-22.pdf 
and the ISA standard “Sharing and reusing clauses” 
http://joinup.ec.europa.eu/elibrary/document/isa_share_reuse_d_2-1-standard-sharing-and-re-using-clauses-
contracts
 

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