[Fedora-legal-list] Re: Question about public domain file in dictd

[Jilayne Lovejoy]

Speaking as a member of the Fedora legal team: What Ben said below 
(thanks Ben!)

I can confirm that this would be considered a public domain dedication 
and does not need an issue to review it, but you can make a MR to this 
file, see instructions at the top: 
https://gitlab.com/fedora/legal/fedora-license-data/-/blob/main/public-do...

Thanks!
Jilayne

On 2/28/24 8:14 AM, Ben Beasley wrote:
>  Speaking as an experienced packager, not a member of the Fedora legal
>
>  team:
>
>  Although some authors conflate it with “public domain,” CC0-1.0 is 
>  just one type of ultra-permissive license. It is not-allowed for code 
>  in Fedora due to concerns about patent-related language in the actual 
>  CC0-1.0 license, not due to a general prohibition on public-domain 
>  dedications or ultra-permissive licenses.
>
>  The md5.c file you mention does not reference CC0-1.0 at all, and is 
>  in fact under a simple “public-domain dedication” that would be 
>  assigned the SPDX id LicenseRef-Fedora-PublicDomain.
>
>  You do need to submit the text for review and tracking under the 
>  process outlined in 
>  https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/legal/update-existing-packages/#_pub..., 
>  but I have no doubt that it will be approved; this is a 
>  straightforward public-domain dedication, and this particular md5 
>  implementation is very widespread and well-known and already bundled 
>  in many of packages in Fedora. In fact, under the old rules for 
>  bundling that required explicit exceptions, this MD5 implementation 
>  was one of the documented “copylibs,” 
>  https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Bundled_Libraries_Virtual_Provides#cite_no....
>
>  On 2/28/24 9:57 AM, Carlos Rodriguez-Fernandez wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > I have been preparing a new update to dictd, and while doing it, I 
> > ran the licensecheck to double-check and cleanup the license tag.
> >
> > I found out that the licenses involved in the source code for the new 
> > 1.13.1 are more than originally specified in 1.12.x. There is a 
> > COPYING file with GPL-2.0-only, but the source code files have more. 
> > The final list is:
> >
> >   GPL-2.0-only AND GPL-1.0-or-later AND GPL-3.0-or-later
> >   AND MIT AND GPL-2.0-or-later AND BSD-3-Clause
> >
> > There is one file in the source code that claims to be "public 
> > domain" [1]:
> >
> >
> >   This code was written by Colin Plumb in 1993, no copyright is claimed.
> >   This code is in the public domain; do with it what you wish
> >
> >
> > This file is indeed code, so the allowed content exception for 
> > CC0-1.0 doesn't apply. The file is not written by the upstream 
> > maintainer but appears to be authored by someone else not in the 
> > maintainer list. I'm not sure how to proceed here. I could request 
> > the upstream developer to see if he can change the license but not 
> > sure will be able since it is not his. Would this be a valid case for 
> > Unlicense?
> >
> >
> > [1] https://github.com/cheusov/dictd/blob/1.13.1/md5.c
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > Thank you,
> > Carlos R.F.
> >
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