Request to relicense all CC0-1.0 code to MIT (or similar permissive license)

[Ben Cooksley]

On Mon, Jan 23, 2023 at 2:13 AM Neal Gompa <ngompa13 at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hey folks,
>

Hi Neal,


>
> During a review for flatpak-kcm for inclusion in Fedora, I discovered
> that KDE currently licenses its CI scripts under the CC0 (SPDX:
> CC0-1.0) license. This is no longer generally permitted in Fedora for
> software/code due to the explicit exclusion of patent license
> grants[1].
>
> While I realize that the likelihood of practical issues around this is
> pretty low for the case that KDE has been licensing the CI scripts
> under, it does cause headaches for us. I've made a request for a
> exception[2] so that we can continue to ship KDE software without
> having to take extraordinary actions, but I would like to request that
> KDE disallow code to be licensed under CC0-1.0 and recommend all
> existing code under that license to be transitioned to an accepted
> permissive license. My suggestion would be to recommend transitioning
> to the MIT license[3].
>

Not sure where this is coming from, given that the vast bulk of our CI
files are just reference statements for Gitlab to sysadmin/ci-utilities,
which likely doesn't meet the threshold for being a copyrightable work.
As for the content of sysadmin/ci-utilities, it isn't under CC0.

At best this likely only covers those projects with custom CI.

Cheers,
Ben


>
> Thanks in advance and best regards,
> Neal
>
> P.S.: I originally sent this to kde-licensing at kde.org, which
> apparently doesn't exist. Sorry for those CC'd getting this twice.
> Oops!
>
> [1]:
> https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/legal@lists.fedoraproject.org/message/RRYM3CLYJYW64VSQIXY6IF3TCDZGS6LM/
> [2]:
> https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/legal@lists.fedoraproject.org/message/Q67KFP4NT3WEL2Z75BYCXMP2IOQHLBJT/
> [3]: https://opensource.org/licenses/MIT
>
> --
> 真実はいつも一つ！/ Always, there's only one truth!
>
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