For Approval: CeCILL (providing source)

[Wilson, Andrew]

Stephane Dalmas wrote:

>>Andrew Wilson wrote:
>>Having freshly
>>re-read the license, now I'll add (3) the excessively broad patent
>>covenant not to sue, which is not limited to the actual
CeCILL-licensed
>>work or its derivatives.
>>
>See my previous answer on the first two points. The patent clause seems

>perfectly fine for such a license (in the spirit of the GNU GPL).

If there is an explicit patent grant in GPL 2.0, it's certainly
news to me.  Your patent grant in CeCILL, however, is so broad that
as written it raises the possibility of "patent laundering," i.e.,
Licensor's patents which are completely unrelated to the covered code
may be inadvertently licensed by releasing code under CeCILL.
Please see the patent grants in licenses such as EPL, CDDL, and
Apache 2.0 for more broadly acceptable terms which do not allow
"patent laundering."

>Internationalization of licenses is a very difficult problem but it is 
>not a reason not to try to solve it. CeCILL is a first attempt for 
>Europe and we plan to go ahead.

Internationalization is good. Vanity licenses are bad.  If you are
arguing that GPL is not enforceable in the EU and a new license
is required, there are multi-million lines of European-written GPL
code which would seem to prove that the free/open source software
community of the EU does not agree with you.

Andy Wilson
Intel Open Source Technology Center