[tz] Use or Apply for SPDX Licence

[Philip Paeps]

On 2020-06-21 04:45:06 (+0800), Paul.Koning at dell.com wrote:
> On Jun 20, 2020, at 4:43 PM, Kim Davies <kim.davies at 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