(2023-05-15, 9:36)Johannes Schauer Wrote: Parts like p/rect.dat are very trivial but are used by thousands of other parts and are still CC-BY-2.0.
I would submit new CC-BY-4.0 versions of these important parts but many are just trivial one-liners where it's difficult to come up with a version that does functionally the same but looks different...
What can be done to improve the situation? What can I do to help?
It seems to me like you've mentioned the obvious and easiest solution already. Heck, even I could whip up a 1x3 plate or a rectangle primitive and grant it the 4.0 license and re-submit it as a totally new part. A trivial one-liner that only references other files would not need to look different; there really isn't any creative content there that would be in danger of being plagiarized. Same with a geometrically defined part like a rect primitive: mathematically the content can only be one thing as defined by the spec. There's no intellectual property to protect (or if there is, it's in the defining specification, not the file itself).
I'm not saying to ignore the license, of course, just that we needn't worry about copying an existing part if its content is so trivial that the same content would be arrived at by any author independently. But if you really do want to recognize the original author(s), you could always place a credit to them within the new part file as a comment, or history line.