The GPL compatible and French law-compatible "CeCILL" licence

[Philippe Verdy]

The CeCILL licence hasbeen designed with legal investigation to be fully 
compatible with both the GPL and the French law (something missing in the 
GPL). Its text is available in French and English (both texts are equally 
enforcable legally).

It has already been scrutinized by the FSF (and infact designed with their 
help) and accepted as compatible with the GPL. It explicitly contains a 
statement that makes it fully compatible with the GPL, and applicable as 
well on artistic works.

The only main differences are that it avoids two problem caused by the 
French legislation regarding:
* the copyright of artistic works (software is an artisitic work in France, 
but unlike it, is not subject ot the "right of author", but subject to the 
"right of who is paying for the development")
* the full denial of responsability which is illegal in France for French 
programmers. If the CeCILL licence islater substituted by the GPL (as 
allowed by CeCILL), the publisher that does it takes itself its own 
responsability about this change of licencing terms, and the french law no 
longer applies (so the original French author has no more responsability on 
this alternate distribution made under the terms of the GPL).

This licence has been jointly developed by three venerable public french 
research institutes :
* the CEA, center for atomic energy,
* the INRIA, one of the 3 founding members of the W3C working in various 
computing and mathematics technologies, and
* the CNRS, national center for scientific research, where tens of thousands 
of searchers and students are working in France and abroad.
The licence is already in use by several open-source projects, and also 
applied in French standards, or in working documents published by these 
institutes for use in international standard bodies that require fair 
licencing terms. It allows reselling of free software, enforces the right of 
access to the sourcesfor softwares, and contains precise definitions of all 
its terms, and rights or obligations.

The licence is open for general use in any open-source or artistic project 
(its text is signed copyrighted because of french law, but only to avoid any 
modification of licencing terms, but verbatim distribution of the licence 
text is allowed, like for the GPL). Like the GPL this licence is "viral", in 
that it only allows use or modification of the software along with other 
softwares under the GPL or CeCILL, but no proprietary licence.

May be you could include it in your list of approved licences. In my humble 
opinion, this licence is also much clearer than the GPL to understand.

See details on www.cecill.info (website available in French and English).