I Changed My License

In the span of 28 years, the author has seen three distinct eras of software licensing. Currently, all of their recent software is available under the European Union Public License 1.2. The author explains their reasons for this decision. Midgard, a web framework, used LGPLv2, a simpler time with fewer free software licenses around.

The example website that came with Midgard was X11 licensed. As the author began working more with JavaScript around 2011, they switched to the MIT license, a simple "do whatever you like, just don’t sue me" license popular in the NPM package ecosystem. After Flowhub closed, the author took a few years off publishing software. Recently, the author decided to switch their default license to EUPL-1.2, a strong copyleft license approved by the OSI and created by the European Union.

EUPL is different from the licenses the author used previously. The strong copyleft nature of EUPL ensures reciprocal licensing, regardless of distribution. Over the years, the author has come to believe that open source advocates were mistaken, and instead of helping users and developers, their efforts benefited large corporations by making it easier for them to build things more cheaply and for billionaires to become trillionaires.

The author argues that it's time to stop using permissive licenses, and instead, if corporations don't want to use their software under their terms, they can build their own. The EUPL has legal translations in 23 languages, which is beneficial in a world where most software is built and used outside the Valley. The author has published two things under EUPL: a new rewrite of the NoFlo Development Environment and the NoFlo itself, which remains MIT-licensed due to its pre-existing status with numerous third-party contributions.