Speaking as an experienced packager, not a member of the Fedora legal team:
Although some authors conflate it with “public domain,” CC0-1.0 is just
one type of ultra-permissive license. It is not-allowed for code in
Fedora due to concerns about patent-related language in the actual
CC0-1.0 license, not due to a general prohibition on public-domain
dedications or ultra-permissive licenses.
The md5.c file you mention does not reference CC0-1.0 at all, and is in
fact under a simple “public-domain dedication” that would be assigned
the SPDX id LicenseRef-Fedora-PublicDomain.
You do need to submit the text for review and tracking under the process
outlined in
https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/legal/update-existing-packages/#_public_domain,
but I have no doubt that it will be approved; this is a straightforward
public-domain dedication, and this particular md5 implementation is very
widespread and well-known and already bundled in many of packages in
Fedora. In fact, under the old rules for bundling that required explicit
exceptions, this MD5 implementation was one of the documented
“copylibs,”
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Bundled_Libraries_Virtual_Provides#cite_note-2.
On 2/28/24 9:57 AM, Carlos Rodriguez-Fernandez wrote:
Hi,
I have been preparing a new update to dictd, and while doing it, I ran
the licensecheck to double-check and cleanup the license tag.
I found out that the licenses involved in the source code for the new
1.13.1 are more than originally specified in 1.12.x. There is a
COPYING file with GPL-2.0-only, but the source code files have more.
The final list is:
GPL-2.0-only AND GPL-1.0-or-later AND GPL-3.0-or-later
AND MIT AND GPL-2.0-or-later AND BSD-3-Clause
There is one file in the source code that claims to be "public domain"
[1]:
This code was written by Colin Plumb in 1993, no copyright is claimed.
This code is in the public domain; do with it what you wish
This file is indeed code, so the allowed content exception for CC0-1.0
doesn't apply. The file is not written by the upstream maintainer but
appears to be authored by someone else not in the maintainer list. I'm
not sure how to proceed here. I could request the upstream developer
to see if he can change the license but not sure will be able since it
is not his. Would this be a valid case for Unlicense?
[1] https://github.com/cheusov/dictd/blob/1.13.1/md5.c
Thank you,
Carlos R.F.
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