Québec’s Own French Language Open Source Licenses

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While doing some work as to open source, I recently came across a section of the list of officially accredited open source license and that includes 3 licenses Made in Québec. These were apparently created by Québec authorities for its own purposes. Not too surprisingly, the original version of these 3 open source licenses is in French, contrary to most others of this kind.

The official site www.opensource.org now lists these 3 licenses, which I’m linking below to a micro-site created by the Centre de services partagés du Québec called “Forge gouvernementale”. The presentation of the documents on this site is much easier to read than the version posted on opensource.org (that presents the text of each license in a single block of text):

The OSS licenses at issue were created with the government’s software development efforts in mind and (initially) presented in French, though an English translation is available. As with other open source licenses, the goal here is to free source code in the manner that maximizes the users’ rights and the ease with which it may be used and redistributed down the line. If you’re curious (I was), the Québec government published the following FAQ about these licenses.

The first license (LiLiQ-P) is akin to the Apache open source license and, thus fairly permissive. The code released under this license may be included in other software that is then distributed without having to make it available with the source code and without being required to distribute it through an open source license.

The other 2 licenses (LiLiQ-R and LiLiQ-R+) are relatively similar to somewhat more restrictive licenses such as the MPL license and the LGPL license, requiring that resulting software be made available, including as source code, through a LiLiQ-type license. Another feature of the licenses at issue resides in their reciprocity provisions, generally allowing the combination of LiLiQ code with code made available pursuant to most other open source licenses.

Is anyone really surprised that Québec would want to express how different it is from the rest of Canada (and the world) by creating its own version of an open source license? Eh, why not?