On Fri, May 16, 2025 at 11:06 AM Alejandro Saez Morollon via legal legal@lists.fedoraproject.org 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...
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