Following its inception in Eiffel by Meyer and its diffusion to other environments (e.g., the standardisation of OCL as part of UML), Design by Contract now faces a major challenge in component-based software engineerin- g (CBSE). Compositional reasoning about system properties from component ones has been recently asserted by the SEI as the "key technical challenge" of CBSE, and contracts as a "key technical concept to support this vision". To live up to these expectations, DbC must tackle extra-functional properties of components and support Klein's "architectural-based attribute reasoning." Besides adopting the necessary new concepts, a good contract language must provide for abstraction, application, composition and scoping mechanisms in such a way to be used from modeling in UML to programming in standard languages (as seamless extensions to Java, C#, C++, Eiffel, and so on) through execution on traditional operating systems with minimal middleware additions. This paper examines conceptual foundations and design decisions to propose GCCL, a novel open generalized common contract language. GCCL is meant to be compatible with existing DbC (sub)languages, and especially OCL.