[Fedora-legal-list] Re: [publican-list] Adjusting copyright information

[Richard Fontana]

On Tue, 6 Oct 2009 14:01:52 -0400
"Paul W. Frields" <stickster at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Tue, Oct 06, 2009 at 01:22:46PM +1000, Ruediger Landmann wrote:
>
> > So far we've looked at the WTFPL[1], CC0[2], and the so-called GNU
> > All-Permissive License[3].
> > 
> > We had to regretfully reject the WTFPL on the basis that some people
> > might find it offensive. :( This is a real shame, because it
> > basically stands for everything that we need the license on the
> > Common Content files to stand for...

Agreed, this is unfortunate. :)
 
> > When we read the GNU "All-Permissive" License, it turned out to be
> > not what it claims, since rather than being "all permissive", it
> > requires re-users to leave the license in place. Relicensing is
> > therefore as difficult as it is now.

I think this is not a correct interpretation, as the mere fact that a
license requires preservation of a licensing notice doesn't mean that
it has a copyleft effect; this is well established in FOSS tradition as
evidenced by BSD and MIT and Apache (etc.) licensing. Nevertheless, it
is true that CC-0 requires no preservation of the CC-0 text; indeed
it logically couldn't because in CC-0 the copyright holder is
at least attempting to abandon all ability to enforce copyright on the
work. 

No objection to CC-0 though, which in the end is probably no worse than
and probably better than traditional simple public domain dedications.

- RF