A first paper dedicated to the European Union Public Licence (EUPL) has been published in the International Free and Open Source Law Review (IFOSSLR), which is one of the most serious and scientific legal publication in the field.
The paper published in IFOSSLR details the origin and main characteristics of the European Union Public Licence (EUPL), as an OSI-approved free or open source software licence, copyrighted by the European Union.
It focuses on the current EUPL v1.1 with a look on the new version 1.2 of the EUPL that has been drafted in 2013 and that the European Commission reports will be published around the end of the year or shortly after.
Comments are relevant for both versions (1.1 and 1.2) as changes are focused on terminology (resulting from the Lisbon treaty) and to the extension of interoperability (i.e. to the GPLv3 and to the AGPLv3 licences).
What makes the EUPL unique is its multilingual working value, specific warranties, references to the Court of Justice of the European Union and its provisions related to licence compatibility, making its “copyleft” variable for facilitating interoperability.
The operation of this copyleft component of the licence (meaning the committment to reuse the same licence when distributing copies or derivatives) is probably its most specific aspect, sometimes wrongly understood as a possibility for “relicensing”, which is not the case: in very specific exceptions, the EUPL authorizes reusing the covered code in other open source projects covered by some other licences, without impacting the primary EUPL licensing. This mechanism is therefore especially developed in this paper.
The pdf issue of the IFOSSLR is dowloadable:
http://www.ifosslr.org/public/ifosslr-v5i2.pdf
See pp. 121-136
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