Researchers at three French government funded research
organisations have introduced a new licence which is compatible
with the Free Software Foundation's GNU General Public License
(GPL).
Plenty of free software licences exist already, but they are
mostly written in English, from the point of view of the US legal
system, which can pose a problem in countries where the legal
system is based on different assumptions.
The new licence, known as CeCILL, is intended to make free
software more compatible with French law in copyright and product
liability, where it differs significantly from US law.
Under French law consumer product manufacturers cannot decline
all responsibility for their products - yet the would-be developers
of many open-source projects, without corporate backing, cannot
afford to expose themselves to unlimited financial risk.
CeCILL offers a way around this. By declaring that software
offered under the licence is intended for knowledgeable users, it
allows software developers to limit their responsibility, said
Gérard Giraudon, head of development and industrial partnerships at
INRIA. Nevertheless, they must take some responsibility, which is
reassuring for software users, he said.
In France, software copyright is governed by laws relating to
artistic and literary creations, not commercial intellectual
property. However, unlike most works of art where the copyright
belongs to the author, copyright in a piece of software belongs to
the company paying for the work.
Like some other open-soucre licences, CeCILL is designed so that
protected works "contaminate" other software in which they are
incorporated, so that that work too must be released under the
CeCILL licence, Giraudon said. In addition, any work released under
CeCILL may also be incorporated into works released under the GPL,
and subsequently released under the GPL.
CeCILL is the first in a family of licences, according to
Giraudon. Other variations planned will have different
characteristics, making them more like French versions of the LGPL
(Lesser GPL) or BSD open-source licences, which allow the use or
inclusion of open-source code with commercial works under certain
conditions.
The name CeCILL is derived from the names of the three research
institutes that created it -- the French Atomic Energy Commission
(CEA), the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) and the
National Research Institute for Computing and Automation (INRIA) --
and the French words for free software, "logiciel libre".
An English version of the licence can be found at
www.inria.fr/valorisation/logiciels/Licence.CeCILL-V1.US.pdf
Peter Sayer writes for IDG