Veteran developer switches all new open-source projects to strong-copyleft EUPL-1.2

A developer who has been publishing open-source software for 28 years says he has changed his default license to the European Union Public Licence 1.2 (EUPL-1.2), ending roughly a decade and a half of releasing JavaScript projects under MIT. In a blog post on bergie.iki.fi that rose to the front page of Hacker News, Henri Bergius, the developer behind the NoFlo flow-based programming environment and the earlier Midgard framework, says all of his new work now carries the strong copyleft license, and frames the change as a repudiation of the permissive licensing camp he once belonged to.

Three eras of licensing

Bergius describes his licensing history as falling into three distinct eras. His first major project, the Midgard web framework, was released under LGPLv2 — a weak copyleft choice he says felt appropriate for a web framework at a time when there were relatively few free software licenses to pick from. Midgard's example website shipped under the X11 license.

Around 2011, as his work shifted toward JavaScript, he switched to MIT. He characterises that license as an arrangement with essentially no obligations beyond a liability disclaimer, and notes that this style had become the norm across the npm package ecosystem, prized for easy interoperability. That era was followed by a fallow period: after the closure of Flowhub, the company he had been building, he published almost no software for several years, citing both his employment situation and time spent working on his boat.

What EUPL-1.2 does differently

The EUPL is a free software license created and published by the European Union and approved by the Open Source Initiative. Unlike the weak copyleft of LGPL or the permissiveness of MIT, EUPL-1.2 is a strong copyleft license. According to the post, it closes what is commonly called the SaaS loophole: the requirement for reciprocal licensing applies regardless of how the software is distributed, so making it available as a networked service does not exempt anyone from the license's terms.

He also points to a practical advantage that gets less attention: the license exists as legally valid official translations in 23 languages. In an industry where most software is now built and used far outside Silicon Valley, he argues, having a license whose legal text holds up across many jurisdictions is a real benefit.

The argument behind the switch

The core of the post reads as an admission of defeat. Bergius writes that the open source camp, in its long-running argument with the free software camp, won the debate but gained little of value for either users or developers. In his assessment, the movement's success mainly made it cheaper for large corporations to build products and helped a small group of technology owners accumulate extreme wealth.

His conclusion is blunt: it is time to stop releasing work under permissive licenses. If corporations are unwilling to use community-built software on the community's terms, he writes, they are free to spend the effort — or the AI tokens — to build their own.

Projects already covered

The post lists four projects already published under EUPL-1.2: reticulum-js, a JavaScript implementation of the Reticulum mesh networking protocol; dacar, a decentralized authorization system built on Reticulum; signalk-energy-predictor, a prediction system for boats powered by renewable energy; and offshore-blogging-system, a tool for publishing blog posts and downloading weather data over InReach satellite text messages.

The rewrite of the NoFlo Development Environment is also being built under EUPL. NoFlo itself, however, will stay under MIT — a practical constraint rather than a change of heart, since the existing project contains substantial third-party contributions that a single author cannot simply relicense.

Why it matters

An individual maintainer changing a default license rarely draws attention, but the post crystallises a sentiment that has been building across the ecosystem. After years in which permissive licenses became the unthinking default for new projects, especially in the JavaScript world, a growing number of developers are asking whether that bargain actually served them or mainly served large commercial users.

The EUPL also offers a path that sits between MIT-style permissiveness and the company-controlled source-available licenses that have generated friction elsewhere in the industry: it is a genuine OSI-approved copyleft license, published by a public institution rather than a single vendor, with multilingual legal standing. For companies, the practical effect is concrete — software under EUPL-1.2 cannot simply be absorbed into a commercial hosted offering without sharing modifications on the license's terms. And the NoFlo exception is a useful reminder for maintainers everywhere: relicensing is easiest at the very start of a project. Once outside contributions arrive under MIT, switching is far more than a matter of editing a file.