{"id":"EUPL-1.2","title":"European Union Public License 1.2","reviewed_on":"2026-09-15","reviewer":"Giray Havur","text_source":"https://spdx.org/licenses/EUPL-1.2.html","text_retrieved":true,"verdict":"created","summary":"Version 1.2 of the European Union Public Licence, the version in current use. Every modelled statement is the same as on the EUPL-1.1 record; the text differs in its definitions, in a longer appendix of compatible licences, and in Articles 14 and 15, which now name the Court of Justice of the European Union and the law of the Member State where the Licensor has his seat. Read the EUPL-1.1 record together with this one: the compatibility clause is quoted rather than modelled, for the reason given in the rubric 3 finding.","findings":[{"rubric":1,"severity":"minor","field":"spdx:licenseId","description":"The record carries the SPDX id EUPL-1.2 as its file name, its IRI and its spdx:licenseId. dct:title is the SPDX name with its long dash removed, and dct:alternative holds the short forms and the licensor's own spelling (Licence, not License).","action":"applied"},{"rubric":2,"severity":"major","field":"odrl:target","description":"Three asset types: dcmitype:Software, dcmitype:Dataset and dalicc:CreativeWork. The object of the EUPL is the Work, defined as \"the Original Work or its Derivative Works\", and the Original Work is \"the work or software distributed or communicated by the Licensor\": software is one case of it, not the whole of it, and the appendix of version 1.2 lists a Creative Commons licence \"for works other than software\". The existing UkOpenGovernmentLicenseForPublicSectorInformation record carries the same three types for the same reason.","action":"applied"},{"rubric":3,"severity":"major","field":"odrl:permission","description":"Article 2 grants \"a worldwide, royalty-free, non-exclusive, sublicensable licence\" to use, reproduce, modify and make Derivative Works, communicate to the public, distribute, lend and rent, and to \"sublicense rights in the Work or copies thereof\". The record therefore permits reproduce, distribute, modify, derive, display, present, commercial use, derivative works, modified works, the distribution fee and dalicc:sublicense. dalicc:patentGrant comes from the last paragraph of Article 2 and dalicc:moralRightsNonAssertion from the paragraph before it, where the Licensor \"waives his right to exercise his moral right to the extent allowed by law\". dalicc:ChangeLicense is deliberately not written: the compatibility clause would justify it as a permission with a dalicc:compliantLicense duty, but consistency_check reports a required cc:ShareAlike together with a permitted dalicc:ChangeLicense as a direct conflict, so the clause and its appendix are quoted in dalicc:additionalClauses instead.","action":"applied"},{"rubric":4,"severity":"minor","field":"odrl:prohibition","description":"One prohibition, dalicc:promote, from the Legal Protection paragraph of Article 5: \"This Licence does not grant permission to use the trade names, trademarks, service marks, or names of the Licensor, except as required for reasonable and customary use in describing the origin of the Work and reproducing the content of the copyright notice\". The text states no other prohibition; in particular it does not forbid charging for a copy, and Distribution is defined to include selling.","action":"applied"},{"rubric":5,"severity":"major","field":"odrl:duty","description":"cc:ShareAlike hangs off the odrl:Set, not off an act, because the copyleft clause reaches the whole of what is distributed or communicated: \"this Distribution or Communication will be done under the terms of this Licence or of a later version of this Licence\". The attribution right of Article 5 gives cc:Attribution and cc:Notice on odrl:distribute, odrl:modify and odrl:derive, and dalicc:modificationNotice on the last two, from \"The Licensee must cause any Derivative Work to carry prominent notices stating that the Work has been modified and the date of modification\". cc:SourceCode sits on odrl:distribute alone, because the Provision of Source Code paragraph is triggered by distributing or communicating; the licence-wide share-alike duty carries it to the rest through the dg_default axiom cc:ShareAlike odrl:implies cc:SourceCode.","action":"applied"},{"rubric":6,"severity":"minor","field":"dalicc:WarrantyDisclaimer","description":"Article 7 is quoted verbatim in dalicc:WarrantyDisclaimer, Article 8 in dalicc:LiabilityLimitation and Article 9 in dalicc:WarrantyOrLiabilityAcceptance, which is what that predicate is for: the licensee may conclude an additional agreement offering warranty or support on its own behalf. dalicc:additionalClauses carries the moral rights and patent paragraphs of Article 2, Articles 3, 4, 6 and 10 to 15, the compatibility clause and the appendix of compatible licences.","action":"applied"},{"rubric":7,"severity":"major","field":"cc:jurisdiction","description":"cc:jurisdiction stays dalicc:worldwide. The grant of Article 2 is worldwide in so many words; Articles 14 and 15 name a court and a governing law, not a territory for the grant. Article 15 reads: \"15.Applicable Law Without prejudice to specific agreement between parties, - this Licence shall be governed by the law of the European Union Member State where the Licensor has his seat, resides or has his registered office, - this licence shall be governed by Belgian law if the Licensor has no seat, residence or registered office inside a European Union Member State.\" Both articles are quoted in dalicc:additionalClauses, and a reader who needs the governing law as data has to read them. dalicc:validityType is dalicc:perpetual, since the licence runs \"for the duration of copyright vested in the Original Work\".","action":"applied"},{"rubric":8,"severity":"gap","field":"dalicc:additionalClauses","description":"The compatibility appendix has no vocabulary term. A licence that lets a derivative go out under one of a closed list of other licences needs both a permission and the list itself; the library can express neither. Proposed term dalicc:compatibleLicenseTest, as proposed in review group 2 for MS-RL and RPSL-1.0, taking the list of licence ids as its value.","action":"none"},{"rubric":8,"severity":"gap","field":"dalicc:additionalClauses","description":"The EUPL is triggered by Communication as well as by Distribution: \"any act of selling, giving, lending, renting, distributing, communicating, transmitting, or otherwise making available, online or offline, copies of the Work or providing access to its essential functionalities\". Providing access to the essential functionalities over a network is the trigger no action term covers. Quoted; proposed term dalicc:networkUseTrigger.","action":"none"},{"rubric":8,"severity":"gap","field":"dalicc:additionalClauses","description":"Article 12 terminates the licence automatically on any breach, with the sublicences of compliant recipients surviving. Quoted; proposed terms dalicc:terminatesOnBreach and dalicc:sublicenseSurvival, both already proposed by earlier review groups of this addition.","action":"none"},{"rubric":8,"severity":"info","field":"dalicc:orLaterVersionOption","description":"The copyleft clause lets the licensee distribute \"under the terms of this Licence or of a later version of this Licence unless the Original Work is expressly distributed only under this version\", which is what dalicc:orLaterVersionOption says on the GNU records. The property is used on the GNU family alone today, so it was not written; the triple would be dalicclib:EUPL-1.2 dalicc:orLaterVersionOption true.","action":"proposed"},{"rubric":9,"severity":"info","field":"record","description":"The consistency check of app.services.composer with the axioms of dg_default returned an empty conflict list.","action":"none"},{"rubric":10,"severity":"info","field":"record","description":"Family: identical in every modelled statement to the EUPL-1.1 record, which is why dalicc:variantKind is \"version\". The differences are in the quoted clauses: the appendix now lists AGPL 3, LGPL, MPL 2, CC BY-SA 3.0 for works other than software, the EUPL itself and the two LiLiQ reciprocity licences, and the European Commission may update the appendix without a new version of the licence. Two of the licences this review group adds, LiLiQ-R-1.1 and LiLiQ-Rplus-1.1, name EUPL 1.1 as compatible in their turn.","action":"none"},{"rubric":10,"severity":"major","field":"dalicc:compatibleWith","description":"Article 5 reads: \"If the Licensee Distributes and/or Communicates Derivative Works or copies thereof based upon both the Original Work and another work licensed under a Compatible Licence, this Distribution and/or Communication can be done under the terms of this Compatible Licence.\" The appendix lists the Compatible Licences: GNU GPL v. 2 and v. 3, GNU AGPL v. 3, OSL v. 2.1 and v. 3.0, EPL v. 1.0, CeCILL v. 2.0 and v. 2.1, MPL v. 2, GNU LGPL v. 2.1 and v. 3, CC BY-SA 3.0 Unported \"for works other than software\", EUPL v. 1.1 and v. 1.2, and LiLiQ-R and LiLiQ-R+. The library holds no record of CeCILL 2.0, so that one is not linked. dalicc:compatibleWith names GPL-2.0-only, GPL-3.0-only, AGPL-3.0, OSL-2.1, OSL-3.0, EclipsePublicLicense10, CeaCnrsInriaLogicielLibreLicenseVersion21, MozillaPublicLicenseVersion20, LGPL-2.1-only, LGPL-3.0-only, CC-BY-SA-3.0, EUPL-1.1, LiLiQ-R-1.1, LiLiQ-Rplus-1.1.","action":"applied"}],"family":"European Union Public Licence","port_of":null,"variant_kind":"version","notes":"Modelled from the SPDX plain text, which is the English language version of the licence; all linguistic versions approved by the European Commission have identical value, as Article 13 states. The source text of version 1.2 uses a long dash to introduce each item of its lists and one long dash inside the copyleft clause; every long dash was replaced with a plain hyphen in the quoted clauses, as the library requires. cc:legalcode points at the licence page of the European Commission, dct:source at the SPDX page the text was taken from."}