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France Hostile To Open Source Software?

Posted by Zonk on from the no-frog-jokes dept.

AdamWeeden writes "According to the Free Software Foundation of France the French Department of Culture is telling free (as in speech) software providers that 'You will be required to change your licenses ... You shall stop publishing free software,' and warn they are ready 'to sue free software authors who will keep on publishing source code.'" From the post: "It appears that publishing Free Software giving access to culture is about to become a counterfeiting criminal offence. Will SACEM sue France Télécom R&D research labs for having published Maay and Solipsis (P2P pieces of software used to exchange data)? Up to this point, the rather technical debate surrounding the issues addressed by DADVSI bill (copyright and neighbouring rights in the information society) makes one ask: Just how much control do the Big Players in the field of culture want to seize? It now looks like years of quibbling have put an end to compromises." More information on the DADVSI bill is available at Infos-du-net.com. They've come a long way since last year.

9 of 524 comments (clear)

  1. Big news by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    Trading copyrighted works is now illegal. Hear, hear.

  2. Re:Is there a French word for "Backroom Deal"? by Majik+Sheff · · Score: 1, Offtopic

    huile pour la nourriture "oil for food"

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    Women are like electronics: you don't know how damaged they are until you try to turn them on.
  3. Okay, so change the license... by pla · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    To charge a "fee", of "services rendered"...

    "In exchange for making the happy little numbers on our router increase faster, you may use and redistribute this however you want". Rephrase in a more GPL-like manner, and translate it into French, and problem solved. No more "free" software.


    Although, one does have to wonder how this applies to non-binary code - Has France effectively banned interpreted languages? I wonder if they realize just how much of their infrastructure depends on Perl. Or for that matter, what about HTML or XML, where the "program" basically resembles plain-text in the first place, and only a under certain interpretations does it do anything extra?


    Overall, just dumb. I don't know all that much about the French legal system, but enforcing this seems quite thoroughly impossible.

  4. Re:jesus fucking christ by SebNukem · · Score: 1, Offtopic

    mod parent up!

  5. Re:I'm not too worried... by SatanicPuppy · · Score: 1, Offtopic

    The 8th century AD.

    Didn't last very long though.

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    ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
  6. Affaire Americaine by Doc+Ruby · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    '"This means that oil imported into the U.S. financed about 52 percent of the illegal surcharges paid to the Hussein regime ... These percentages roughly correspond to the percentages of Iraqi oil sent to the U.S. and elsewhere during this period," Berkovitz said '

    In other words, America accounted for more of the Oil for Food scams than everyone else combined, even excluding foreign proxies for Americans. I think the French word for that is "touché", or maybe "merde de taureau".

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    make install -not war

    1. Re:Affaire Americaine by Doc+Ruby · · Score: 1, Offtopic

      No, the US paid for its oil illegally, as it says a mere two sentences prior in the article to which I linked: "In all, Berkovitz said that the 525 million barrels of Iraqi oil -- about 660,000 barrels per day -- that ended up in U.S. hands during the two-year surcharge period amounted to $118 million in illegal surcharges paid to Iraq by the United States".

      The next two sentences say "Bayoil was responsible for importing 200 million of the 525 million barrels of oil received by the United States, he said. The committee singled out the U.S. Office of Foreign Assets Control, which the United Nations repeatedly warned about Bayoil's scheme".

      So you're just lying to attack me. You probably don't even hesitate long enough to click the link I posted. You don't care about Oil for Food, Iraq, the truth or anything else. You just lurk around waiting for a chance to call me childish names and lie about real matters that concern real adults. Get out of the way and take your petty vendettas out on yourself.

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      make install -not war

  7. bumper sticker.. by dbizzle · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    reminds me of a bumper sticker i see everyday in the parking lot.. "France: Irrelevant for over 150 years."

  8. Re:Napoleon by Rimbo · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    Because France only conquered most of Europe :-P

    Ahh, but you could say the same about the Germans and Japanese in WW2, and where are those holdings now? They lost the war, and the holdings they'd conquered along with it. If your holdings don't survive the war you acquire them, it doesn't count. Now if you lose 'em at some point later, that's a different thing.

    Compare this with what Ying Zheng (aka Qin Shi Huang) accomplished. The lands he conquered, stayed conquered. The borders he defined by his empire ca. 200BC pretty much remain to this day.