[Fedora-legal-list] Re: Creative Commons as code license

[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

 



On Fri, May 16, 2025 at 11:06 AM Alejandro Saez Morollon via legal
<legal@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> Hi! I’m working on including a now-retired dependency inside the golang-x-perf package. The dependency is licensed under CC-BY-4.0[0], but it clearly contains code. As far as I understand, CC-BY-4.0 is only permitted for content, not code. But the original package, which was shipped until Fedora 40, also had CC-BY-4.0 as its license.
>
> So, my questions are: where can I see if this was an exception?

There is no exception recorded for CC-BY-4.0:
https://gitlab.com/fedora/legal/fedora-license-data/-/blob/main/data/CC-BY-4.0.toml?ref_type=heads

Note that the spec file erroneously refers to CC-BY-SA (a Callaway
umbrella name covering various versions of CC BY-SA).

I believe it is true that under the Callaway system, use of
seemingly-free-ish CC license variants (i.e., CC-BY and CC-BY-SA) was
discouraged but, in practice, tolerated for code, which might be
relevant when thinking about this. The current stance, that the
allowable CC licenses are allowed for documentation and content but
not code, is an outgrowth of the effort to have well defined approval
criteria that accompanied the shift from Callaway to SPDX identifiers
to represent and classify licenses. Part of it is also that there are
certain significant problems with the seemingly-free-ish CC licenses
that were mostly overlooked in the past, which the effort to have
carefully defined review and approval criteria sort of exposed.

I know there is at least one other widely used Go dependency that uses
CC-BY-4.0 for code, I can't think of the name at the moment but it
isn't this one.

> And what would be the next step to request an exception?

You should open an issue in fedora-license-data.

Richard

-- 
_______________________________________________
legal mailing list -- legal@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
To unsubscribe send an email to legal-leave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
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/legal@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Do not reply to spam, report it: https://pagure.io/fedora-infrastructure/new_issue




[Index of Archives]     [Fedora Users]     [Fedora Desktop]     [Fedora SELinux]     [Big List of Linux Books]     [Yosemite News]     [Gnome Users]     [KDE Users]

  Powered by Linux