On 2020-06-21 04:45:06 (+0800), Paul.Koning@dell.com wrote:
On Jun 20, 2020, at 4:43 PM, Kim Davies <kim.davies@iana.org> wrote:
Quoting Brian Inglis on Saturday June 20, 2020:
It would be useful to distributions, packagers, and organization licence checkers if the tzcode and tzdata were covered by (a) Public Domain SPDX licence identifier(s) WTFPL, etc. or applied for it's own e.g. IANA-TZ-PD.
In response to a few different requests that the IANA registries have more explicit licensing, we've been working with the IETF and IETF Trust recently on developing an approach to licensing that preserves the current nature but makes it clear. We'll take this tagging into consideration.
I don't get it. Much of the material is marked "public domain". That has a precise meaning. Licenses are different from public domain. Why is anything needed here?
As others have pointed out, while the concept of public domain is reasonably well-defined in the US and similar legal systems, it's rather more nebulous in many (most?) parts of the world. Many European countries, for example, make a distinction between "copyright" and "moral rights". While copyright can be assigned or licensed (and sometimes opted out), there are no (or few) such provisions for other rights. A CC0 or similar tag would make it more clear that the authors/contributors expect no rights to their contributions even when they are subject to legal systems that don't have a formally defined public domain. Unfortunately, I don't think it's practical to retroactively apply a CC0 tag. Formally, you'd need each individual contributor to agree. Given the age of the tz project, this may be impossible. Philip -- Philip Paeps Senior Reality Engineer Alternative Enterprises