Creative Commons as code license

[Alejandro Saez Morollon]

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? And what would be the next step to request an exception?

[0] https://src.fedoraproject.org/rpms/golang-github-ajstarks-svgo/blob/f40/f/go...

[Richard Fontana]

On Fri, May 16, 2025 at 11:06 AM Alejandro Saez Morollon via legal
 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