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Comment by fanf2 | Hacker News Reader

Not for that reason.

The copyleft trolls that Doctorow wrote about are using a termination clause in attribution-required CC licences. (Remember, there are lots of different CC licences with varying requirements on licensees.) CC0 doesn’t impose requirements on licensees nor does it have a termination clause, so it isn’t affected by these trolls.

However, CC0 is not good as a software license. It is explicitly restricted to being a copyright license. If there are patents covering the software, CC0 does not give you permission to exercise the patented invention.

It’s better to use 0BSD or MIT-0 instead, which grant permission to use the software without weird exceptions.

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> It’s better to use 0BSD or MIT-0 instead, which grant permission to use the software without weird exceptions.

0BSD and MIT-0 are zero attribution ultra-permissive copyright licenses, aka public domain-equivalent copyright licenses.

CC0 is a public domain declaration with a fallback copyright license for jurisdictions (such as Germany) which don't recognise public domain declarations.

There is a big technical difference between the two, in some jurisdictions (such as the US) – CC0 puts something in the public domain, MIT-0/0BSD technically doesn't. A real difference in theory, maybe not much in practice.

If the author really cares about the public domain part, something like Unlicense is a better option than MIT-0/0BSD – an actual public domain dedication, without the patent/trademarkconcerns which exist regarding CC-0.

If they want to make the maximum possible number of people happy, they could even use disjunctive licensing, e.g. CC-0 OR Unlicense OR MIT-0

I copied your comment to https://github.com/janmojzis/tinyssh/issues/85

If author/maintainer doesn't frequent HN, perhaps discussion there might get some action.

You can find a more authoritative but longer explanation in an OSI FAQ about CC0 https://opensource.org/faq#cc-zero and the related discussion http://lists.opensource.org/pipermail/license-review_lists.o...

0BSD and MIT-0 don't mention patents explicitly though, few licenses do. I only know of two: https://blueoakcouncil.org/list

They don’t mention copyright explicitly either.

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