Towards an OSI-approved "waive all rights" software license

[Richard Fontana]

On Mon, Apr 18, 2011 at 11:00:21AM -0700, Lawrence Rosen wrote:
> 2. The CC0 license says nothing about patents. I find this particularly
> troubling when a CC0 license (or the BSD license, for that matter!) is used
> for software or specifications by companies that have large patent
> portfolios. 

In fact CC0 explicitly excludes any licensing of patents. 

  No trademark or patent rights held by Affirmer are waived,
  abandoned, surrendered, licensed or otherwise affected by this
  document.

I am not too troubled by that to the extent CC0 continues to be
applied to rather trivial pieces of code, but use of CC0 on a
substantial body of code might be another matter.

I have recently suggested to Creative Commons that the issue should
perhaps be revisited in future versions of CC0, now that its
suitability for software has been acknowledged.

- RF