Richard Fontana, one of the authors of the GPLv3 license and a consultant on open licenses and patents at Red Hat, announced plans to amend the rules of the Fedora project to prohibit the inclusion of software licensed under Creative Commons CC0 in the repositories. The CC0 license implies that the author waives their rights and distributes it as public domain, allowing software to be shared, modified, and copied without any conditions for any purpose.
The reason for the CC0 ban is cited as the uncertainty regarding software patents. The CC0 license includes a clause that explicitly states that the license does not affect patent rights and trademark rights that may be used in the application. The potential influence through patents is viewed as a possible threat, and thus licenses that do not explicitly allow for patent use or do not waive patent rights are considered not belonging to the category of free and open-source software (FOSS).
The possibility of hosting non-code content licensed under CC0 in the repositories will remain. For packages with code already hosted in the Fedora repositories under the CC0 license, exceptions may be made to allow continued distribution. However, the inclusion of new packages with code licensed under CC0 will be prohibited.
Source: opennet.ru
