Description
The CC0 license is becoming increasingly challenging for some users.
The Fedora Project recently announced that it will not allow new packages with CC0-licensed code (as opposed to content):
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.)
It is not yet clear what will happen with existing CC0-licensed code in the distribution. (I maintain the hedley package in Fedora Linux.) About hedley in particular, Richard Fontana writes:
For hedley, this would be an entirely sensible use of CC0 if CC0 were actually suitable for code. If it isn't any trouble I'd encourage you to see if the upstream maintainers would be open to relicensing under something else (MIT-0, Unlicense, etc.). Alternatively, this is the type of code use of CC0 for which a policy exception might be appropriate.
Based on #52, this isn’t the first time the CC0-1.0 license’s explicit non-grant of patent and trademark rights has caused concern for potential users. With the Fedora Project’s decision and the general winds of change in perception of this license, it seems like more and more users are likely to encounter problems with the choice of license.
Are you open to the idea of relicensing, or dual-licensing, under another very-permissive license? MIT-0 seems to be widely used and accepted these days.