Correct. You release something under CC0, someone else sees it, patents it, and sues you.
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Landslide7648@discuss.tchncs.de 1 day agoCould you explain why this is bad? Software patents aren’t a great thing, are they?
Shayeta@feddit.org 1 day ago
JackbyDev@programming.dev 1 day ago
Correct. They’re bad. And if someone releases code under CC0 that has patented stuff in it you may be liable for using their patent without permission because CC0 says in section 4a,
Compare that to MIT which is considered to implicitly grant patent rights by saying you may deal in the software without restriction. Apache specifically gives you explicit patent rights in section 3.
So the problem is that CC0 ik it’s public license fallback specifically says that it does not grant patent rights.
CC0 is a trap for software. Please avoid it. Please encourage others so avoid it.
To the extent of my knowledge, the only public domain dedication with permissive license fallback that is approved by both FSF and OSI is the WTFPL. Which is also a crayon license. Public domain is a weird concept and not all jurisdictions have it and not all jurisdictions allow you to manually put things into it. This is why they need the permissive license fallback. You’re better off using a well known and well understood permissive license.
Landslide7648@discuss.tchncs.de 9 hours ago
Thank you for the through explanation! That was very helpful