The European Union Public License (hereinafter “EUPL”) is an open source license approved by the European Commission in 2007, which was specifically designed to adapt to the regulatory framework of the European Union.
Why was it necessary?
Free software/open source licenses have their origin in the United States, so common law has had an influence on the writing of the original open source licenses and those that have been developed later. This means that the interpretation and application of the clauses of said licenses within the framework of continental European copyright can be problematic in some cases.
As an example, one of the most significant differences between these two systems is that American copyright conceives the transfer of all the rights held by the owner of a work to a third party, while continental copyright law does not allow the transfer of the moral rights over the work, which are inherent to the author and cannot be waived.
The European Commission issued a study on open source licenses for software developed by the Commission itself at the end of 2004 in which it showed that the licenses existing to date did not comply with certain requirements for the European Institutions. Specifically, the controversial issues were related to: lack of specification of applicable law and jurisdiction; warranties and limitations of liability; copyright terminology, not adapted to European practice; legal validity in different languages.
That is why, despite the large number of open source licenses available (more than 300), the European Commission did not find any license that perfectly adapted to the developments it wanted to carry out and opted to develop the EUPL. The first version was published in 2007 and in 2009 the Open Source Initiative (OSI) certified it as an “open source” license for complying with its principles.
The latest version of the EUPL, version 1.2, was updated by Commission Implementing Decision (EU) 2017/863 of 18 May 2017, which is available through this link.
Press here to access the full open source license document.
Author Agustín Alguacil
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