On Fri, Aug 5, 2022 at 7:49 PM Richard Fontana <rfontana@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > Hi, > > I posted the following recently to the Fedora legal list, but it was pointed out by Fabio Valentini that the legal list is sort of obscure so I'm reposting it here in the hope that it may reach more interested people: > > CC0 has been listed by Fedora as a 'good' license for code and content > (corresponding to allowed and allowed-content under the new system). > 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. While we are moving towards a > process in which license approvals are going to be done primarily > through the Fedora license data repository on gitlab.com, I wanted to > note this on the mailing list because of the significance of the > change. > > 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.) The regular Creative Commons > licenses have similar clauses. > > A few months ago we approved ODbL as a content license; this license > contained its own "no patent license" clause. Up till this time, the > official informal policy of Fedora has been that 'content' licenses > must meet the standards for 'code' licenses except that they can > prohibit modification. The new Fedora legal documentation on the > license approval categories will note that allowed-content licenses > can also have a no-patent-license clause. In a FOSS development and > distribution context, the absence of patent licensing for non-software > material is of significantly less concern than the software case. Have you considered reaching out to the Creative Commons group to revise the license to drop that language from CC0? It seems silly to drop acceptance of the license without at least engaging to correct the problem. -- 真実はいつも一つ！/ Always, there's only one truth! _______________________________________________ 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
