The README asserted "GPLv3, matching the Jellyfin plugin it serves" with no
LICENSE file behind it. That answer conflicts with the architecture the same
README describes forty lines earlier, in two ways.
This repository is vendored *into* the other three, which carry three different
licences (MIT, GPL-3.0, GPL-3.0-or-later). Copyleft here pushes obligations
downstream into repositories that did not choose them, for the sake of a build
script. The dependency also runs inward, so "matching the plugin" had the
direction backwards — this repo does not serve the plugin, the plugin consumes
it. CC0 imposes nothing on any of the three.
A specification also has to be freely implementable. The design assumes third
parties reimplement it: the audio-signature conformance fixture exists so that
"an implementation can be written from that file alone", and federation is
worthless if only one server implementation may exist. A software licence on a
specification invites the question of whether an implementation written from it
is a derivative work; CC0 removes the question rather than answering it.
Same reasoning as the CC0 licence on contributed manifests (JRay-public-server
UR-019): where an artefact's whole purpose is to be copied and reimplemented,
asserting rights over it costs more than it protects.
Text from creativecommons.org, not transcribed.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
