The Open Source Initiative board, after visiting the European Commission, has finally approved the European Union Public license on the 4th of March.
The EUPL 1.1 – the revisited version of the EUPL 1.0 including recommended modifications resulting from the OSI discussion – is supported by the EUPL community. Stakeholders can share opinions and pose questions through the EUPL forums and blog.
Hi Patrice-Emmanuel,
I am glad you joined the conversation. I think that having a license (EUPL or not) translated in all European languages is a great thing.
What I object to the EC is that you decided to go your way, instead of participating the GPLv3 process, managed with a public and transparent consultation.
What I object to you is your adversarial approach. I believe that opening to FSF licenses is your concern, since you are trying to convince European public administrations to use the EUPL.
Show them that is convenient, that they can still stand on the shoulders of giants, and try harder to consider GPL, and software licensed under the GPL, as your best friend, not a foe.
My two European cents
HP just announced the availability of FOSSology, an open source tool that can be used to track and monitor the use of Open Source software within an organization. The main functionality made available at the moment is license detection, more features will be added in the next future.
At the Linux Meets Business conference held yesterday in Germany Christine Martino – Vice President Open Source and Linux Organization at HP – introduced also FOSSBazaar, a community platform to discuss best practices related to the governance of FOSS.
I had the chance to learn more about HP open source plans just last week, when Martin Mychlmayr invited me to talk with him, Phil Robb – Engineering Section Manager in the Open Source and Linux Organization at HP - and Bernard Marclay, FOSS Marketing Manager at HP.
HP wants to demonstrate its experience with FOSS Governance obtained in over 7 years for internal purposes, and it will be offering services related to FOSS Governance at large (e.g. defining open source policies, supporting the adoption process with its consulting division, etc).
As a matter of fact they are partnering with many actors. Doug Levin – Black Duck software CEO – made some public statements welcoming FOSSology’s introduction. Steven Grandchamp - OpenLogic CEO – asked to comment the announcement told me:
As a Strategic Sponsor of FOSSBazaar, OpenLogic is working with others to provide information and tools that help enterprises understand the issues around open source governance. Â Sharing our open source expertise, along with tools like OpenLogic’s OSS Discovery (which produces an inventory of open source being used) and HP’s FOSSology (which uncovers licenses in open source), will help enterprises leverage the significant financial benefits of open source software.
Also Stormy Peters is blogging on the matter, and others will come. While having dinner with HP people honestly I couldn’t come out with a firm’s name that they didn’t contact yet. We also spoke about the business side of the initiative, I will soon write on the matter.
The man behind the FOSSBazar community.Â
Martin, a known Debian developer and fellow researcher, is the man behind the FOSSBazar community. He is the FOSSBazaar Community Manager, and he will be working with partners to define content, help members to conduct valuable and interesting discussions and debates, and he will be joining conferences all over the world to promote the FOSSBazaar community.
I wish him all the best of luck!
About Martin Michlmayr.Â
Martin Michlmayr has been involved in various free and open source software projects for well over 10 years. He acted as the leader of the Debian project for two years. In this role, he performed important organizational and coordination tasks within Debian. Martin works for HP as an Open Source Community Expert and acts as the community manager of FOSSBazaar. Martin holds Master degrees in Philosophy, Psychology and Software Engineering, and earned a PhD from the University of Cambridge.
You are doing a great job telling about the people who stand behind the projects, and not just the project themselves. Such information makes a very valuable supplement to the official websites and news articles as it makes everything much more ‘realistic’ and understandable.
Having received your kind permission to translate some of your postings into Russian for INFO-FOSS.ru, we will be republishing this one in the international expert opinion section that we’re about to set up.
I have a more general request, though. As you know, I am currently a member of two teams: ALT Linux, which is the largest Free Software development company in Russia and INFO-FOSS.ru, which is an information project on Free Software and Open Standards targeted primarily at government public.
Both organisations are in need of cooperation with the international research community. As a member of ALT Linux, I would be happy to collaborate and share our experience on Free Software acquisition management in government contracts that we have gained in a series of research projects for the Ministry of Economy. As a member of INFO-FOSS.ru, I am interested in making the project part of the international research community and consequently move from borrowing information mostly from European publications to being involved in its production. There has been a number of FOSS-related developments in Russia recently, and I believe that such cooperation could become mutually beneficial.
I will highly appreciate any help from you side as even partial implementation of these wishes will be a major step forward!
Egor,
I am glad and honored to be published on INFO-FOSS.ru, please link to the original for comments and suggestions.
You might share your ALT Linux experiences with open source acquisition by public administrations with an international audience. If you wish so my blog is always open to your contributions, and you might get the attention of potential EC partners and eventually get info-foss.ru involved with FP7 and beyond.
Dear Egor,
I share with Roberto the wish to help in strengthening the ties between Russia and Europe on FOSS technologies and approaches. I would be happy to help in bridging the work done in the past (in the COSPA, SPIRIT, OpenTTT and FLOSSMETRICS projects) if it may be helpful, and learning from you and your experiences.
I am working on the new revision of our EU guide to OSS, and any addition and resource will be welcome.
Dear Carlo,
Thanks for your message! Yes, sharing your experience on these projects will be very helpful. There is not a little information gathered already, and I often feel myself in need of someone to guide me through.
I believe that it is the appropriate moment to make a summary of our achievements in an English presentation. Meanwhile, I will try to contact you via email.
Roberto Galoppini, and 
P-E Schmitz are discussing. 
Hi Roberto,
Publishing legal instruments with equal value in all EU languages and letting European courts work with it, is really “business as usual” for the European Institutions: Community Law counts million pages, valid in 22 or 23 languages. In case of uncertainty, national courts may ask the European Court of Justice to clarify. It is a simple fact that the GPL V2 and V3 (relative) failure is that FSF was unable to deal with linguistic diversity (that they consider as a major risk; it is true that they do not benefit from a supra-national court to help). Having said that, the EUPL has other merits: the license complies with European flavour of copyright, information to consumer, warranty and liability. The most important however, is that the intention of EUPL promoters is not to compete with the GPL or any other license. The objective is long term: to bring more administrations to license their source. We are at the early beginning of this, but there are currently substantial move in this direction and several Member States consider policies to license under EUPL. Last, the EUPL has a compatibility list (with GPLV2 and other copyleft licenses). This is also unique: it would be interesting to try solving license proliferation through “mutual recognition” between a club of equivalent licenses, sharing the same compatibility list: this would also provide more freedom to developers. Who has comment on this idea? It is a fact – unfortunately – that “compatibility” is seen by the FSF as “compatibility in the one-way direction of GPL, GPLv3 and AGPLv3”. The reverse situation is not even imagined by the FSF, (and by the way, their current web site ignores totally the EUPL – remember Mahatma Gandhi: “First they ignored us…”). A last word about the “biased” comparison I did between the EUPL and GPLv3 during the EOLE event in Paris: Of course you can say it was biased! (since I am a EUPL advocate), but please do not take my comparison as an attack “against” the GPLv3: I just report facts: GPLv3 is about 3 times longer, is full of technical details, is complex (even for a lawyer) and as it is officially valid in English only it may not be the most persuasive license for a German or French administration. Could anyone object? Now if you are happy with GPLv3 and AGPLv3 no problems, go on!