CeCILL

French Free Software Licenses

Goals

Distributing Free Software is not giving up all of its rights on the software. Authors as well as users have rights, duties and responsabilities which are defined by the licence attached to the software and applicable law. Today, the majority of French Open Source Software is distributed under licences originating from the United States such as the GNU General Public License. This poses a number of delicate legal questions.

The step taken by CEA, CNRS and INRIA is to work out a family of licences conformant to French law and compatible with the main Anglo-Saxon Open Source licences of which they retain the principles. Two criteria govern their development:

• Respecting the principles of Open Source distribution, for the benefits of authors and the whole community. The exercise of the rights given to the users implies certain duties for them in order to preserve the character of the software for future redistributions.
• Their conformity to French law regarding two aspects, civil liability on one hand and intellectual property on the other hand. From a civil liability point of view, accessibility of the source code and rights to copy, modify and redistribute arising from such a licence have as a counterpart to offer to the users only a minimal guarantee. The authors of the software, the holder of the patrimonial rights and the sucessive licenses only bear a restricted responsibility. From the point of view of French intellectual property rights legislation such a license offers, in addition, a better protection for the authors and holders of the rights on the software.

For CEA, CNRS INRIA, major players of French and European research, developing Free Software is essential. These licenses conformant to French law are essential tools for publication and diffusion in a highly competitive world context, tools for transfert to final users as well as commercial companies, that are more and more interested in the economic models around Open Source software.