Fedora sours on Creative Commons 'No Rights Reserved' (CC0) license

guest · Jul 27, 2022

Lack of patent rights waiver in CC0 cited as problematic
July 25, 2022

Fedora, the popular Linux distribution, will no longer incorporate software licensed under CC0, the Creative Commons "No Rights Reserved" license.

In order to support the wide re-use of copyrighted content in new works, CC0 provides authors "a way to waive all their copyright and related rights in their works to the fullest extent allowed by law." The license arose in response to the 1998 Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act (CTEA), which extended the duration of copyright by 20 years at the expense of the public domain.
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But CC0 explicitly says the licensor does not waive patent rights, which for free and open source software (FOSS) is a potential problem. That means, for instance as described here, if you use CC0-licensed code in your project, and the author of that code later claims your project is infringing a patent they own regarding that code, your defense will be limited.
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In a message to The Fedora Project's mailing list for legal issues, Richard Fontana, a technology lawyer for Red Hat (which sponsors Fedora), explained that while CC0 is cited as a "good license," it won't be for much longer.

"We plan to classify CC0 as allowed-content only, so that CC0 would no longer be allowed for code," said Fontana. "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."
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Bradley M. Kuhn, policy fellow at the Software Freedom Conservancy, [...]
Kuhn argues that despite efforts by companies to convince projects to avoid copyleft licenses, software developers should really consider adopting the GPL or copyleft-next rather than relying on a license that is silent on patent licensing or, like CC0, refuses to offer any patent rights waiver
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