Comment by msbarnett | Hacker News Reader

Comment by msbarnett | Hacker News Reader

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> If you choose a license which explicitly says you're not waiving your patents, it insinuates that you are holding some, and they are used in the project.

Not anymore than the BSD-no-nuclear clause insinuates that there's a version somewhere that is suitable for being run in the control system of nuclear power plants, it doesn't.

CC0 just makes it clear what is in-scope for the license – copyright, not patents, because it's intended as a formalization of public domain and that is not something that can be formalized re: patents – unlike BSD or GPLv2, which implicitly are about copyright but never actually come out and say so (and if you were looking to screw someone over with some patent you hold, you're better off with something that doesn't even mention it, like GPLv2, rather than prompting the lawyers to explicitly ask about patents because the license reminds them that they're not covered)

Authors who assign to the public domain do so generally because they are mavericks who dislike any sort of permission scheme for the use of information, tied to any sort of authoritarian rules, regardless of how relaxed the permission is.

The fallback license in the CC0 is supposed to be just a begrudging inclusion that applies in jurisdictions where the assignment to the public domain isn't upheld; the author who releases a work under the CC0 would be most pleased if there were not such jurisdictions, and the public domain assignment were enough.

OK, so then you have this fallback license which says, "I am not granting any use of the patents covering the ideas in this work". That's completely stupid; nobody who ideologically favors the public domain would want to use this.

The only rational use for CC0 is by a corporation which has developed some patented technology (e.g. video encoder) and wants to promote a reference implementation, to be used by paying patent licensees for making applications (plus individuals for educational, non-commercial, personal use).

If a fallback license of a public domain assignment says anything other than "you can use and redistribute this as you wish", it is not an earnest, genuine, ideological public domain assignment. Someone who wants to make such a grant to the public, yet uses the CC0, has been duped.

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