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Comment by knowledge-clay | Hacker News Reader

0BSD?

0BSD is actually incompatible with a desired pure CC0. Unlike CC0, 0BSD keeps copyright intact. It's just a license with no conditions except the usual disclaimer; CC0 attempts to cause a public domain dedication wherever possible. Consider the following:

1. Let there be a file F. F is released to the public under 0BSD.

2. Let there be a project P. P includes code from F. The license notice of F is scrubbed as part of the inclusion process.

3. P is released as CC0.

The author of P cannot release the project as CC0 because the author has no right dedicate another person's code (F) to the public domain. Because 0BSD doesn't cause a public domain dedication in jurisdictions that accept doing so, F would have to continue being separate and explicitly exempt from the effects of CC0 to be an accurate of its usage terms. Effectively, this makes 0BSD be a de-facto attribution license in a CC0 project. In practice, it makes no difference, but it's legally deeply inelegant.

Fails on criterion 4, and I think that's a real issue.

Github is the de-facto default sourcecode plattform. If it isn't a standard option on Github then it doesn't feel like a standard license.

Not an alike license.

What do you mean? CC0 and 0BSD are both public domain equivalent.

CC0 isn't an OSI-approved license. (It was withdrawn from consideration around patent language concerns.) MIT-0 (or probably 0BSD now as well) is probably the closest you get to a public domain license to the degree that putting something in the public domain is recognized in a given jurisdiction.

...isn't that literally the opposite of public domain? You can't have it both be public domain with no copyright and ALSO use copyright to enforce what people do with their copies of it.

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