The fact that the EUPL is available in all the official languages of the Member States of the European Union is a very important aspect of the license for me. This means I could reasonably fight for the freedom of my software in the local courts available to me in my home country, which does not have English as an official language.

As the European Commission claims on their site, as one of the reasons they chose to create a new license instead of relying on those already available:

> The licence should have equal legal value in many languages.

In addition, the EUPL is not any license text some (from a legal perspective random) people came up with, but the text of the license was written and voted into law by the EU itself, therefore it can and does rightfully claim the following, which is invaluable to me as a FLOSS author residing in the EU.

> any litigation resulting from the interpretation of this License [...] will be subject to the jurisdiction of the Court of Justice of the European Union [...]

So even if the local courts interpretation in my home country falls short, the Court of Justice of the European Union will surely take into account the intended purpose of this license as laid out by the legislators of the EU.

I've never see that detail, that's incredibly insightful. Granted, for outside the EU it doesn't win much, but I'm guessing most reasonable places would defer to what the host country intended.

That being said, as another commenter pointed out, the "make available as service" language is a bit weaker in EUPL than AGPL.

I, for one, am glad that licenses exist that aren't written in English exclusively.

Most of the world aren't native English speakers and most native English speakers live in a particularly British-derived system of law. Most open source licenses are full of assumptions that the legal system they're implied in are either modeled after the American system or derived from Common Law. Translations exist, but they're not more than that.

The EUPL was explicitly designed to comply with EU trademark and copyright law, which differs from American copyright law in various ways. It also fixed the "you can read the license in your own language but if you want to use those freedoms you'd better learn English because that's the version that counts" problem.

One big limitation to the EUPL is that it only covers European languages (as it was designed for the EU).

I can't say I feel too bad about needing to pick the English license from an alphabetically sorted list. There aren't any officially valid translations of AGPL, nor for Apache, nor for MIT. I don't think many programmers will run into problems using English, as programming is often very English oriented, but for the common people, that's different. A rural farmer with little to no access to higher education should know that he has the right to change the software on the embedded equipment he bought, even if he doesn't speak a word of English. He won't be altering the software, but perhaps he knows someone who could, and knowledge about possibilities can be the start of change.

After all, what freedoms does free software provide if it's only free to the minority of English readers?