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CeCILL: La Licence Francaise Du Logiciel Libre
News for nerds writes "Researchers at three French government-funded research organizations revealed the new Open-Source license, known as CeCILL (English .pdf here), which they say is compatible with the FSF's GPL. CeCILL is intended to make free software more compatible with French law in two areas where it differs significantly from U.S. law: copyright and product liability. I, for one, welcome our nouvelle overlord of freedom."
Different legal system, so you need to adapt the license for it.
It's funny (as in sad "funny") that americans seem to think that others dislike them a lot more than people really do. Of course, as some parts of the US have acted out on that misrepresentation the past few years, they are at serious risk of making it self-fulfilling.
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I suspect they just want a "GPL" of their own that doesn't come from those "stupid Americains" ...
Okay, I shouldn't feed the trolls, but...
Yes, you're right: many french people do think "stupide Americians". Most software developers don't however, simply because they deal with other developers from all countries in the world on a regular basis. But if a Franco-French GPL is what it takes to further the cause of free software in the eyes of the general population and in courts, why not? I'm all for it.
This is about developing free software, not about your stupid france-vs-america bull. If you can't talk about developing free software without communicating your totally unrelated biases, then please don't.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
I consider this part problematic. After all, when you start downloading the software, you may not be able to detect the licence, and therefore how should yoi agree to it? IMHO a license should never be assumed to be agreed on until you had at least the chance to see it. Moreover, what about dual-licensed software? Say, a software comes both under this license and under the GPL, and I want to agree to the GPL only?
OTOH I like the following part:
Note that there's no limitation of that clause to software derived from the licensed one, which IMHO means as soon as I accepted this license for a specific piece of software, I'm entitled to use all the licensor's patents covering that code freely in any project, even those not derived from this (i.e. basically the licensor is completely opening up the patents used in that code). However IANAL, and also I fear that this will be refined before any real software is licensed with this.
(BTW, it sucks not having Copy&paste enabled in that PDF)
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
I'm not French but I'm getting tired of the jokes that are made each time something about France is published here. The French reading this site are often just coders that share our same spirit of OS and Linux and such.
The jokes are often funny and the criticism is okay. Just not on every single subject that touches France.
Don't say this aloud, but the GPL is not worth the bits it's written on in France. The FSF states very good reasons not to translate the GPL in other languages, but in France if a contract is not in French, it's not worth anything. There is a law about this, maybe someone will provide a link (sorry my French is not that good).
I was told this by people that have been working on the subject---I help out the KDE-i18n-it team, and the issue of translating the GPL surfaces every now and then, and one point made is what I reported here.
I would really like to know whether this separate licence you mention is in French, any chances you find it?
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What's interesting about this licence is that is has been written by institutions close from the french government - the CEA are strongly bound to it because they're the ones in charge, AFAIK, of both military and civilian nuclear technology, and the CNRS and INRIA are well-known national research institutes.
IANAL, but I'm quite sure such a licence is something that may potentially be taken seriously by courts, at least in France. If only because of its apparently complex french lawyerspeak... And because of its origins, probably way more serious from the perspective of a judiciary system than a licence written by a group of idealists in a country where laws aren't the same, and in a different language. As some more or less explicitly pointed here, licence translations aren't that good - I guess the potentially ambiguous nature and abusive lexical complexity of lawyerspeak aren't something that is easily translateable.
Now, there is something in the press release that may make some cringe. Here's a fairly literal translation of a snippet in this release :
This licence is the first of a family intended to develop itself along principles characterizing other very used licences
At the end of this sentence is written a small superscript 2 that sends to a footnote whose meaning goes as follows :
Namely the LGPL (Lesser General Public Licence), QPL (Q Public Licence) and BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution) licences.
I'll let you ponder on whether BSD's a free licence...
- Hadriven
Oddly enough, because of Slashdot, I know much more about US copyright law than about EU/Dutch law (I am Dutch). So I could be wrong.
But anyway, if the GPL isn't valid for some reason, then I would think that it is just void, no matter where you are. And yes, then the Berne convention applies - you have to get permission from the author to copy any copyrighted work. There's no reason why it would suddenly be free for all, just because there's an invalid license associated with it.
I believe posters are recognized by their sig. So I made one.
As have been stated over and over again, the GPL gives rights, it does not remove them. In other words, if it is indeed non-valid, due to language related reasons or other, then the source is simply a document with copyright applied to it. No need to get all nervous and paranoid.
Karma: 2.71828182846 (Mostly due to small, fun pills)
I think the whole arrogance thing is overblown. Yes Parisian waiters are arrogant - you expect that. But by and large they're just regular people trying to get by in the world just like most people. You find some friendly people, some @$$holes. Same everywhere you go.
It's no different to American tourists in London. The knee-jerk reaction is that they're just a bunch of fat, loud, obnoxious Yanks. But I bet some of them are really nice friendly people!
No, that wasn't a troll. Don't mod it as such.
--
This sig is inoffensive.
'Arrogant' is a remark I hear all my life about Americans and French alike. What a load of crock. There's what - ~300 M people in these two countries and all of them are arrogant? Your comment, on the other hand, makes you (at best) ignorant.
Personally, I'd rather people continued to contribute changes to open source projects because they considered the existence of good open source software to be beneficial to themselves, rather than because they were forced to by the GPL, but then I still have some faith left in humanity.
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As a Frenchman myself, I have to agree. When I was in high school in Germany, we had French school books (designed by French people to teach French to foreigners) that were basically saying France is not only about pleasure of all kinds, it also is a major hi-tech nation
They went on showing major French tech achievements: the TGV (French bullet train), the Airbus, and the Ariane rocket.
Not a single word was spoken about the fact that THREE OTHER NATIONS were involved in the Airbus project, not to mention SIXTEEN in the Ariane project.
On that very day, it finally dawned on me why so many people hated us and yet most of us didn't even know it.
Or consider the French European policy. The French government has grown so used to treating the EU as a modern-day colonial empire that it was shocked when most European governments turned their back to it at the first chance they could get - namely supporting the Iraq war, even though it'd mean contempting international law and alienating voters.
OTOH, quite the same thing can be said about the USA. I guess it is related to the fact both countries consider themselves as models to be followed.