Europe
News and information from Europe 🇪🇺
(Current banner: La Mancha, Spain. Feel free to post submissions for banner images.)
Rules (2024-08-30)
- This is an English-language community. Comments should be in English. Posts can link to non-English news sources when providing a full-text translation in the post description. Automated translations are fine, as long as they don't overly distort the content.
- No links to misinformation or commercial advertising. When you post outdated/historic articles, add the year of publication to the post title. Infographics must include a source and a year of creation; if possible, also provide a link to the source.
- Be kind to each other, and argue in good faith. Don't post direct insults nor disrespectful and condescending comments. Don't troll nor incite hatred. Don't look for novel argumentation strategies at Wikipedia's List of fallacies.
- No bigotry, sexism, racism, antisemitism, islamophobia, dehumanization of minorities, or glorification of National Socialism. We follow German law; don't question the statehood of Israel.
- Be the signal, not the noise: Strive to post insightful comments. Add "/s" when you're being sarcastic (and don't use it to break rule no. 3).
- If you link to paywalled information, please provide also a link to a freely available archived version. Alternatively, try to find a different source.
- Light-hearted content, memes, and posts about your European everyday belong in other communities.
- Don't evade bans. If we notice ban evasion, that will result in a permanent ban for all the accounts we can associate with you.
- No posts linking to speculative reporting about ongoing events with unclear backgrounds. Please wait at least 12 hours. (E.g., do not post breathless reporting on an ongoing terror attack.)
- Always provide context with posts: Don't post uncontextualized images or videos, and don't start discussions without giving some context first.
(This list may get expanded as necessary.)
Posts that link to the following sources will be removed
- on any topic: Al Mayadeen, brusselssignal:eu, citjourno:com, europesays:com, Breitbart, Daily Caller, Fox, GB News, geo-trends:eu, news-pravda:com, OAN, RT, sociable:co, any AI slop sites (when in doubt please look for a credible imprint/about page), change:org (for privacy reasons)
- on Middle-East topics: Al Jazeera
- on Hungary: Euronews
Unless they're the only sources, please also avoid The Sun, Daily Mail, any "thinktank" type organization, and non-Lemmy social media (incl. Substack). Don't link to Twitter directly, instead use xcancel.com. For Reddit, use old:reddit:com
(Lists may get expanded as necessary.)
Ban lengths, etc.
We will use some leeway to decide whether to remove a comment.
If need be, there are also bans: 3 days for lighter offenses, 7 or 14 days for bigger offenses, and permanent bans for people who don't show any willingness to participate productively. If we think the ban reason is obvious, we may not specifically write to you.
If you want to protest a removal or ban, feel free to write privately to the primary mod account @EuroMod@feddit.org
view the rest of the comments
Highly interesting. However:
So these are the parts of the EUPL 1.2 that are most relevant to copyleft:
Having read this section multiple times, also in different languages, I preliminarily believe that the following still remains possible:
Let's say that some person or entity "A" has released some code under the EUPL.
Some other person or entity "B" creates a derivative work and distributes it (including all of A's code) under the LGPL. This is allowed per the first sentence of the EUPL's Compatibility clause above: "this Distribution or Communication can be done under the terms of this Compatible Licence". Here B is a licensee of the EUPL-licenced work, and what the final part of the Compatibility clause (just like the text that you quoted) says is that B, being a licensee of a EUPL-licensed work, continues to be bound by all of the EUPL's copyleft obligations. Fair enough.
Now some third person or entity "C" comes along, and takes just this re-distributed work, which is being distributed by B under the terms of just the LGPL. Here C has no obligations under the EUPL, because C is only dealing with code that is distributed by B under just the LGPL. That is, C is solely a licensee under the terms of the LGPL.
And thus the exploit would be: Corporation C pays some straw man company B to re-distribute A's interesting EUPL code under the LGPL, so that corporation C can pick it up while only needing to comply with the weaker copyleft of the LGPL.
I am not an expert in copyright law, which is what these licenses are based upon and cannot analyze the text.
Still, couldn't you make it even more straightforward by forking twice yourself?
I'd by surprised if the license authors did not consider this. Lawyers wrote this with consideration of EU law after all, not some laypeople.
If I had to guess: Any inclusion of EUPL code in another project would have to be marked as being under the EUPL. This is solely to inform anyone who wants to fork this section and distribute the code in form of SaaS to abide by source code requests.
It's like an EU variant of the AGPL whose many conditions about linking apparently don't hold up in EU court. The GPL's are all primarily considering US copyright law after all.
I think the EUPL has indeed outruled such redistributing-to-oneself by defining
(Besides, I could imagine that even without this definition, such redistributing-to-oneself would already constitute a violation because it would count as an act in bad faith.)
Keeping up copyleft is a neverending struggle against influence campaigns and lobbying operations telling us and telling public officials, "Don't be so obsessed with copyleft like the ideologues at the FSF are; all those scenarios you're hearing about up won't occur anyway." And then they try to privatize the X Window System. The second document that you linked to (this one) actually has this interesting sentence in the Disclaimer at its top: "The Matrix is not influenced by ideology (telling the good and the ugly, urging people to use or to avoid specific licenses)." It does sound like the authors have been under such an influence.
My theory would be that these lawyers, top professionals doubtless, were being tasked something like "By golly, we have 27 languages, 27 legal systems, and the French are already using their own favorite licence—you have to give us something we can work with". And so interoperability, convertibility, became their top priority, to which they would indeed consciously or unconsciously sacrifice watertight copyleft.
That being said, the issue with how well the GPL and AGPL fit European jurisdictions must of course be resolved somehow.
Oh, I didn't consider the "any other" aspect.
Welp, I can still register several distinct legal entities in different EU countries, can't I? Maybe one could be a "Taking every EUPL work on the internet and relicensing it under LGPL as a service" company. That's bound to make some money from SaaS companies if it would be this easy to purge the EUPL terms.
Though the "ideology" quote is a bit awful, I'll give you that. The matrix itself does look fairly neutral though, especially with this part under "Discussion of Linking":
I'd also argue the 27 legal systems might not be too relevant since copyright law is generally equal in the different member states. The remaining legal issues (e.g. warranty) are irrelevant for interoperabilith between licenses. Also, most importantly, there are only 24 languages in the EU.
If the official guidelines are recognized by courts as legally binding then I think the EUPL is superior to even the AGPL. Sadly that remains to be seen due to the lack of EUPL projects out there (and the lack of corresponding lawsuits).