CeCILL license recognised by the Open Source Initiative

The Open Source Initiative (OSI) has just recognised the CeCILL 2.1 license, the first free software license to conform to French law. Proposed by CEA, CNRS and Inria, it belongs to a group of three licenses which cover a large range of user and developer needs.

Historically, the first free software licenses were Anglo-Saxon. However, since 2004, a group of licenses have filled the gap in French law. Issued by a group composing of players in transfers, scientists and Inria, CEA and CNRS solicitors, they cover the three main needs of software developers:

• CeCILL is modeled on the GNU GPL giving it greater legal certainty;
• CeCILL B allows re-use without any constraint other than an obligation quote;
• CeCILL C is well suited to the distribution of libraries and more generally software components.

They also have an advantage for users: in case of dispute, the dispute may be settled by the French legislation.

CeCILL is recognised as a free software license by the Free Software Foundation (FSF) since its second version. CeCILL 2.1, meanwhile, has recently been recognised by the Open Source Initiative, reaffirming Inria's support in the dynamics of free software.

More than a dozen open source applications are already distributed under the CeCILL license including  Marica, Coban, Archelios, Scilab, micropainter and PMB present in this repository.

Source: INRIA 
Authorisation: OSI 
Licence website: cecill.info