On June 21st, 2023 the PrestaShop project’s live update was held for the sixth time and streamed live.
PrestaShop, a French scale-up born in 2007, may not be very well known outside professional e-commerce stakeholders. Most public sector officials may never have heard of it. However, the PrestaShop project is worldwide one of the leading open-source e-commerce platforms on the web, powering over 300,000 web stores generating some 20 billion euro turnover!
Open source means licensing and indeed, PrestaShop is released under the OSL 3.0 license, and is freely available on GitHub to download, modify, and use to build online stores. These “dependencies” may itself be distributed under a number of purely permissive licences (among them, Apache, BSD and MIT are the most used), and only under one really reciprocal license outside the OSL: the EUPL.

It seems that the reason of such permission is that, contrary to other “copyleft” licences (like the GPL or AGPL), the EUPL has a compatibility list that includes the OSL-3.0. The source code of all dependencies or derivatives can be made available for reuse in any OSL-3.0 project and the risk of incompatibility between various reciprocal licences is avoided.

As a major european commercial success story, the PrestaShop figures looks impressive: they say that a store is created every 4 minutes in the world via its intermediary. Since 2014, PrestaShop, now translated into forty languages and present in 190 countries, has doubled its own turnover to reach 20.5 million euros last year. Its clients include La Redoute, Decathlon, K-Way, and multiple startups.

More information: https://devdocs.prestashop-project.org/8/contribute/contribution-guidelines/compatible-licenses/