[License-review] CC0 incompliant with OSD on patents, [was: MXM compared to CC0 ]

Tzeng, Nigel H. Nigel.Tzeng at jhuapl.edu
Thu Mar 8 15:06:37 UTC 2012


On 3/7/12 8:41 PM, "Russ Nelson" <nelson at crynwr.com> wrote:
>(I think we're ALL agreed that patents
>which are not freely licensed -- at least for open source software --
>are not compatible with open source software, right?)

No. I say no is because I see explicit trademark and patent rights
exclusion from other open commons licenses for data, etc and even code
when you count CC0.

Without knowing the reasons why they explicitly choose to do so I'm
disinclined to accept the assertion that there is no case where explicitly
not granting patent rights has no value to the open source community as a
whole...not just for the more vocal parts of the community that joins
these lists.

Also, by making this assertion without challenge I believe that you will
more easily end up with a scenario where BSD and other useful licenses get
deprecated.




More information about the License-review mailing list