That's where you need to read the actual CC0, not just my referral to it. https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/legalcode https://creativecommons.or

That's where you need to read the actual CC0, not just my referral to it. https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/legalcode https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/legalcode It's carefully written to address your concern about "to the extent permitted by law", including a public license fallback: > 3. Public License Fallback. Should any part of the Waiver for any reason be judged legally invalid or ineffective under applicable law, then the Waiver shall be preserved to the maximum extent permitted taking into account Affirmer's express Statement of Purpose. In addition, to the extent the Waiver is so judged Affirmer hereby grants to each affected person a royalty-free, non transferable, non sublicensable, non exclusive, irrevocable and unconditional license to exercise Affirmer's Copyright and Related Rights in the Work (i) in all territories worldwide, (ii) for the maximum duration provided by applicable law or treaty (including future time extensions), (iii) in any current or future medium and for any number of copies, and (iv) for any purpose whatsoever, including without limitation commercial, advertising or promotional purposes (the "License"). tl;dr: It degrades to the MIT license but without the attribution requirement. True, there is no patent license, but neither the MIT or BSD licenses nor the GPL before v3 have a patent grant either. You'd be slagging off projects from jQuery to Linux (GPLv2) to LLVM if you demand an explicit patent grant for everything you use. I do find it worrisome that there'd be this much fear of the CC0 dedication, even if unfounded. Could my statement be rewritten to make it more clear?