I can talk for France. I used to work in a lab depending from the CNRS and arriving there I learned about the French version of the GPL, BSD and LGPL, the CeCIL

I can talk for France. I used to work in a lab depending from the CNRS and arriving there I learned about the French version of the GPL, BSD and LGPL, the CeCILL familly (CeCILL-A, -B or -C respectively) ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CeCILL https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CeCILL ) They claim compatibility with GPL, BSD and LGPL and also that CeCILL was necessary for valid open source licenses in France. That made me raise eyebrows on many levels: - Does it mean the GPL/BSD/LGPL is unenforceable in France? - Does it mean the CeCILL is unenforceable in other countries? - The CeCILL allows to relicense a work under a future revision of the license. I know some GPL projects do that, I personally am extremely suspicious of this possibility. I raised these points but never got good answers from law specialists. The guys I could reach were specialized in "intellectual property valorization" and actually did not know anything about open source. They also made me realize in the french version of the law, the notion that copyright protects a source code is extremely disputable: In France you can't patent or copyright an idea, and numbers and mathematical formulas are recognized as ideas. It is accepted that a computer algorithm is equivalent to a mathematical formula. Ergo, in a source code, you can't protect an algorithm but an implementation. That is, as I understood when pushing a bit more, variable names and whitespace structure are the only copyrightable things in a program. My understanding is that an obfuscater or a code formatter would likely remove any copyright claim from a source code when it comes to french laws. I wish we had an actually active Pirate Party or EFF to try push the limits over that nonsense.