Licence choice?

[Thatoo]

Hello,

I'm wondering the reason for choosing the MIT licence, a permissive licence instead of a copyleft one? Is there any ambition of moving toward an open core model?

As a european project, why not choosing the European Union Public Licence (EUPL) that has been thought to be consistent with the copyright law in the Member States of the European Union, while retaining compatibility with popular free software licences such as the GNU General Public License?

Is there any document or a conversation that explain the choice of the licence?

[davehakkens]

didnt think about it too much.
Happy to reconsider if you can provide a good pro/con list

[Thatoo]

MIT (permissive) :
Less red tape and complex legal statements;
The provided source code could be faster accepted and reused in other projects, increasing chances to become "a reference" or "a standard";
Permissive licenses implement no restriction for reusing the software in other projects, even "proprietary": there is no obligation to publish the source code in the case of re-distribution;

EUPL (copyleft) :
Copyleft licenses like the GPL or AGPL or EUPL stating that in case of distribution, software "using" any part of the covered source code must be covered by the same license appear as toxic for most business environments, fearing the obligation to share their own proprietary code due to some "viral" effect.
At the contrary, permissive licenses boost informal sharing and reuse. Even for public sector administrations like in France, this is a good reason to recommend it as a preferred option.

Releasing a new version under the EUPL instead of the MIT main change is that economic stakeholders will not be able to fork community-platform into their closed source software. They'll have to keep it open source. The choice of the EUPL, which is much more moderately "share-alike" (compatible with similar licences) and "weak" rather than "strong copyleft" and which, governed by European law, is never "viral" looked a reasonable compromise given the number of vendors now selling products based on the software.

The licence is available in 23 official languages of the European Union. All linguistic versions have the same validity.

The licence was developed with other open-source licences in mind and specifically authorizes covered works to be re-released under the following licences, when combined with their covered code in larger works:
GNU General Public License (GPL) v. 2 & v. 3 GPL v2: EUPL v1.0, GPL v3: EUPL v1.2
Open Software License (OSL) v. 2.1, v. 3.0 EUPL v1.0
Common Public License v. 1.0 EUPL v1.0
Eclipse Public License v. 1.0 EUPL v1.0
CeCILL v. 2.0 & V 2.1 EUPL v1.0
Mozilla Public License v. 2 EUPL v1.2
LGPL v2.1 & V3 EUPL v1.2
LiLIQ-R & LiLIQ-R+ EUPL v1.2
GNU Affero General Public License (AGPL) v. 3 EUPL v1.2