Richard Fontana wrote: > We plan to classify CC0 as allowed-content only, so that CC0 would no > longer be allowed for code. This is a fairly unusual change and may > have an impact on a nontrivial number of Fedora packages (that is not > clear to me right now), and we may grant a carveout for existing > packages that include CC0-covered code. Sorry, but I have a hard time taking this seriously. Considering the history (see below), it sounds absolutely ridiculous to me. To give some historical context: There was and is still a lot of software out there sloppily declaring itself as "public domain", which, in many jurisdictions, is not even legally allowed. So Fedora has over the years tried to approach those upstreams convincing them to adopt an all-permissive license instead. And, there comes the point: Fedora has EXPLICITLY SUGGESTED CC0 to those upstreams as a legally sound alternative to use! So now, Fedora wants to ban software for using a license that Fedora itself has been EXPLICITLY RECOMMENDING to use for years. This is going to hurt the reputation of the Fedora Project big time, in addition to making us potentially lose hundreds of packages (whose authors might not be willing to relicense their code AGAIN, after Fedora tells them that the license they recommended is suddenly no longer acceptable; after all, authors who put their code under "public domain" or CC0 are authors who do not want to spend time on licenses or even on their software at all, they just want to drop it out there and let people do what they want with it). This is going to be a huge fiasco. And what do you suggest the software use instead? Hopefully not the vague WTFPL? (I wonder whether the claim that the WTFPL implies a patent license would stand in court.) MIT-0 sounds like the most reasonable to me: https://spdx.org/licenses/MIT-0.html > The reason for the change: Over a long period of time a consensus has > been building in FOSS that licenses that preclude any form of patent > licensing or patent forbearance cannot be considered FOSS. CC0 has a > clause that says: "No trademark or patent rights held by Affirmer are > waived, abandoned, surrendered, licensed or otherwise affected by this > document." (The trademark side of that clause is nonproblematic from a > FOSS licensing norms standpoint.) It is unfortunate that this is only coming up now, after years of Fedora itself recommending CC0. But then fdk-aac-free is also not allowed in Fedora and should be removed: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Licensing/FDK-AAC | 3. NO PATENT LICENSE | | NO EXPRESS OR IMPLIED LICENSES TO ANY PATENT CLAIMS, including without | limitation the patents of Fraunhofer, ARE GRANTED BY THIS SOFTWARE | LICENSE. Fraunhofer provides no warranty of patent non-infringement with | respect to this software. | | You may use this FDK AAC Codec software or modifications thereto only for | purposes that are authorized by appropriate patent licenses. (That is not the only clause whose freeness was disputed, but if that clause is unacceptable for CC0, I do not see why it would be acceptable for FDK- AAC.) > The regular Creative Commons licenses have similar clauses. So, e.g., CC-BY-SA is also not acceptable for software? (I have seen that used for code by some people who, I assume, liked the idea of copyleft, but not the GNU project. I do not know whether any of that code has ever made it into Fedora though.) Kevin Kofler _______________________________________________ devel mailing list -- devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe send an email to devel-leave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Fedora Code of Conduct: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/project/code-of-conduct/ List Guidelines: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines List Archives: https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Do not reply to spam, report it: https://pagure.io/fedora-infrastructure/new_issue
