REUSE FAQ language reworked

[comradekingu]

No description provided.

[comradekingu]

Or you do nothing of the sort, which is why this is bad advice.
Much less do you do anything to help yourself and your newfound assumptions if you want to have other contributors from other jurisdictions.

[mxmehl]

Thanks for the wording improvements! However, I'd suggest to not change this content bit, but concentrate on wording/typos in this PR.

[comradekingu]

@mxmehl That part is no less a mistake. Licensing something CC0 doesn't put it into the public domain. Much less in any sense compatible with taking contributions globally. This is because some countries don't have this provision.
"CC licensing" is furthermore a scourge meaningless in terms of reuse, because it doesn't necessitate anything meaningful seeing as "NC" is also part of it.

[carmenbianca]

Licensing something CC0 doesn't put it into the public domain. Much less in any sense compatible with taking contributions globally.This is because some countries don't have this provision.

The fallback provisions of CC0 are functionally identical to the public domain, however.

A person using CC0 (called the “affirmer” in the legal code) dedicates a work to the public domain by waiving all of his or her copyright and neighboring and related rights, if any, in a work, to the fullest extent permitted by law. If the waiver isn’t effective for any reason, then CC0 acts as a license from the affirmer granting the public an unconditional, irrevocable, non exclusive, royalty free license to use the work for any purpose.

And I'll happily defer to Creative Commons as an expert authority when they say:

And while no tool, not even CC0, can guarantee a complete relinquishment of all copyright and database rights in every jurisdiction, we believe it provides the best and most complete alternative for contributing a work to the public domain given the many complex and diverse copyright and database systems around the world.

I'm not sure exactly how it's a mistake to suggest CC0 as a "no rights reserved" solution. Are there jurisdictions where CC0 is broken?

[comradekingu]

It doesn't do anything productive. What it does do is proliferate the amount of licenses (and concepts) to take into account, where this one in particular adds nothing over its already mentioned alternatives. I would argue it opens up a whole new FAQ:

to the fullest extent permitted by law.

The outcome isn't "complex". You have to adhere to a copyright system and its protections to license your way out of it, and that doesn't work. Reason why is some jurisdictions require commission, some don't allow relinquishing copyright that way, and some allow changing ones will (or ones next of kin to do so). Some tack on extra requirements to avoid slander by default, etc. It doesn't reliable remove one person from the equation, much less function any differently between many.

There is no global (or near gloabl as the case with copyright) of relying on common public domain, so there is no hack to be had by leaning on copyright to get there.

TL;DR "we believe it provides the best and most complete alternative for contributing a work to the public domain" isn't "If you really want to exclude a file" because no additional benefit is to be had here.

Through no fault of the license is that the case, but CC remains an incompatible mess at large.

[mxmehl]

We already have at least one issue suggestion to re-word this. Please let's discuss this over there.