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-domain-text.txt
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/#_public_domain,
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_note-2.
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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