License of Scilab 5

[Sylvestre Ledru]

Hello,

A big step for Scilab! It took a while, but here we are.

The INRIA and the Scilab Consortium have finally decided to change the
license of Scilab to CeCILL [1] [2].

The CeCILL (from "CEA CNRS INRIA Logiciel Libre") license is a free (as
beer and speech) license. 
This license has been designed for both french and international laws
and to be "GPL-Compatible" [3].

Thanks to this change, we send a strong signal of openness and free
software orientation.
By this action, we also intend to extend the use of Scilab by other free
projects/software and facilitate the integration of Scilab in free
Linux/BSD distributions.

Regards,
Sylvestre

PS: Technically speaking, we will soon release the Alpha version of
Scilab 5. This version will be released under the term of the CeCILL
license. However, we are aware of a few licenses issues which will be
dealt with later.

[1] http://www.cecill.info/index.en.html
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CeCILL
[3] http://www.fsf.org/licensing/licenses/#CeCILL