European Union Public Licence (EUPL)

Summary

License 1.2: [BG] [CS] [DA] [DE] [EL] [EN] [ES] [ET] [FI] [FR] [HR] [HU] [IT] [LT] [LV] [MT] [NL] [PL] [PT] [RO] [SK] [SL] [SV]. What is the EUPL? EUPL is an acronym for "European Union Public Licence". The first EUPL draft (v.0.1) went public in June 2005. A public debate was then organised by the European Commission (IDABC). The consultation of the developers and users community was very productive and has lead to many improvements of the draft licence; 10 out of 15 articles were modified. Based on the results of these modifications (a detailed report and the draft EUPL v.0.2), the European Commission elaborated a final version (v.1.0) that was officially approved on 9 January 2007, in three linguistic versions. By a second Decision of 9 January 2008, the European Commission validated the EUPL in all the official languages of the European Union. By a third Decision of 9 January 2009, the European Commission clarified specific points of the EUPL, publishing the version 1.1 in all the official languages of the European Union. The Commission Implementing Decision (EU) 2017/863 of 18 May 2017 updating the open source software licence EUPL to further facilitate the sharing and reuse of software developed by public administrations (OJ 19/05/2017 L128 p. 59–64 ) published the version 1.2, with extended compatibility. Why the EUPL? The purpose of the European Commission is first of all to distribute its own software under the licence. Some applications developed in the framework of the IDABC programme, such as Circabc, or Eusurvey have already been licensed under the EUPL in 2007. Other European Institutions are also interested in using the new licence. But why creating a new legal instrument from scratch when more than 100 other F/OSS licences exist, such as the GPL, the BSD or the OSL? The reason is that in a detailed legal study no existing licence was found to correspond to the requirements of the European Commission: The Licence should have equal legal value in all E...