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benbalter
benbalter.github.com/_posts/2014-10-08-open-source-licensing-for-government-attorneys.md
Your post talks about 'best practices' for US Government publications is to use the CC0 license for all works. However, the CC0 license does not address contributions to USG works that may have patent rights entangling them (see clause 4 of https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/legalcode). How do you avoid problems like the Rambus litigation (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rambus#Lawsuits)? Contributors can knowingly release their copyrights, while retaining their patent rights, and then use the patent rights to sue either the US Government, or any downstream users of the USG supplied code.
@ckaran Patent risk only affects software for which patents are a concern, which I'd argue is a small subset of all software (if that weren't true, there would be no need for a license without an explicit patent grant, of which there are many examples). If you're releasing the code for a website that publishes press releases, you're not likely to be exposed to much patent risk. Obviously scientific or military code is a different story.
It'd be inappropriate for me to speak to specific scenarios, and if you're a government employee, I encourage to seek the advice of your GC, but generally speaking, a contributor license agreement, or CLA, while not necessary in many circumstances, may be called for to explicitly define what license(s) the non-government contributors are granting with their contribution. See Apache's CLA as an example, which includes a patent grant.
@benbalter What you say is correct on all points; I'd just like you to bring it up in your post. As it stands, it implies that patent concerns can be hand-waved away, which isn't true in general. Would you be willing to make that well known in your post?
Would you be willing to make that well known in your post?
Completely, and great suggestion. I can't promise when I'll have a chance, but will do so. Thanks for raising the issue.