[License-review] Non-binding straw poll: Do you think CC0 should be approved?

Henrik Ingo henrik.ingo at avoinelama.fi
Fri Mar 2 06:44:58 UTC 2012


-1

Reason: the exclusion of patents in 4a. (I was mostly perhaps focusing
on this since it had already been pointed out, and hence didn't try
hard to find more problems. But it seems likely that this is the only
problem and there are no others.) Explicit exclusion of patents is
against OSI license-review precendent (MXM).

Also a few observations around this reason:

It was also argued that other text in the license waives the Affirmers
right to take patent action *for the Work in question*. My
interpretation is that the situation is at least ambiguous. Also the
eventual statement from CC itself didn't support that interpretation
(perhaps didn't strongly reject it either).

Another observation is that also among those that were in favor of
approval, the justifications seemed to be evenly divided among those
that 1) say the CC0 does include a sufficient patent waiver and is
therefore compliant with OSD; and those that 2) say the CC0 does
exclude any patent license and this is a good thing and not required
by OSD. My point here is that the interpretation of the license was
highly ambiguous also within the +1 camp.


henrik



On Fri, Mar 2, 2012 at 8:21 AM, Karl Fogel <kfogel at red-bean.com> wrote:
> The CC0 thread was so enormous that it could sometimes be hard to
> distinguish between the volume and the content behind each point made.
>
> Now, the approval process is not a matter of majority vote, but still
> I'm curious to see how many people felt the 4a objection (or any other
> problem) was serious enough to warrant rejection, and how many would
> approve anyway.  Knowing these ratios would help us determine whether to
> continue investigating, perhaps by bringing in some more legal
> expertise.  (For example, one thing I wanted to do, but didn't have
> time, was bring in the people at the FSF who evaluated CC0 and hear
> their reasoning.)
>
> If you wish to participate in this straw poll, please follow up to this
> mail with "+1" if you think CC0 should be approved, or "-1" *followed by
> the reason* if you don't think it should be approved.
>
> Any -1 that isn't accompanied by a reason I won't count in my tally.
> (+1 responses have an implicit reason -- that the license fallback
> portion of CC0 is OSD-compatible -- so there's no need to state it).
>
> Thanks!
>
> -Karl
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> License-review at opensource.org
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henrik.ingo at avoinelama.fi
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