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. _______________________________________________ devel mailing list -- devel@lists.fedoraproject.org To unsubscribe send an email to devel-le...@lists.fedoraproject.org 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@lists.fedoraproject.org Do not reply to spam, report it: https://pagure.io/fedora-infrastructure/new_issue
