Security News > 2022 > July > Fedora ditches CC0 'No Rights Reserved' software over patent concerns
The Fedora Project will no longer allow CC0-licensed software aka code with 'No Rights Reserved' to be distributed on the Fedora Registry, or as part of the Fedora Linux distribution.
The reason for the policy change is simply this-while Creative Commons' CC0 license allows content creators including software developers to waive copyright to their work, it has no bearing on the patent or trademark rights that the creators continue to retain.
In a statement to The Register, Bradley M. Kuhn, policy fellow at the Software Freedom Conservancy explained, "Patents that [apply to] software are a constant threat to the rights of users and redistributors of FOSS - particularly those that deploy FOSS commercially. That's why SFC opposes the patenting of software entirely."
"Finally, any free program is threatened constantly by software patents. We wish to avoid the danger that redistributors of a free program will individually obtain patent licenses, in effect making the program proprietary. To prevent this, we have made it clear that any patent must be licensed for everyone's free use or not licensed at all."
The expert further suggests that software developers are better off adopting transparent licenses like GPL or copyleft-next, as opposed to CC0 where patent rights are not waived or licenses with ambiguous patent clauses.
Interestingly, technology blogger Diego Elio Pettenò aka FlameEyes points out how in the past, Fedora had recommended the use of CC0 when juxtaposing it with 'Unlicense,' whereas Google, over time, moved towards rejecting software patches licensed under either CC0 or Unlicense.