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.
Hi!
I was made aware of this change just today.
Given that this is a "significant" change, would it be possible to announce this more widely / publicly than the rather obscure "legal" mailing list?
We already have a not insignificant number of packages in Fedora that are licensed CC0. For example, it's not really a "popular" license for Rust projects, but we have 22 of them that are licensed CC0:
https://sourcegraph.com/search?q=context:global+r:src.fedoraproject.org+file...
Should we attempt to inform upstream projects that their code is, going forward, not going to be considered "FOSS" unless they relicense? What will happen if a project that we have in Fedora today grows a dependency on something that's still CC0-licensed? Will that block us from updating that software until the affected project is re-licensed? Who will convince projects that this is necessary? Where is publicly visible announcement that they could be pointed to? (And no, a mailing list post doesn't count.)
As it is, I consider this change a serious roadblock for getting up-to-date software (including security fixes) to users.
Fabio