Messages in this thread | | | Date | Sun, 15 Jun 2003 09:05:26 -0700 | From | David Brownell <> | Subject | Re: GFDL in the kernel tree |
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Christoph Hellwig wrote: > 2.5.71 introduces two GFDL-licensed files in the kernel tree...
A "grep" in Documentation/DocBook shows me three GFDL files, last time I grepped there were none. So I was aware that adding one would likely raise some issues ... evidently a variety of people have noticed that GPL for docs/specs isn't the best solution.
> (2) Documentation/DocBook/gadget.tmpl, one of the files, includes > extracted from source files licensed under GPL, making this > a GPL license violation.
Almost all of that is covered by a "GFDL Exception"; see the top of <linux/usb_gadget.h>. I can submit a patch to do the same for one other file (usbstring.c, one function).
But there's a potential issue for kerneldoc for one particular structure, "usb_ctrlrequest", which was merged into 2.5 from a patch on 2/2/2002 ... I think I know who contributed that patch. If that author isn't willing to let that text be covered by GFDL, and for some reason I can't replace it with similar text that is (mostly pointing to the USB spec for details), I'll pull that bit out. In short: This particular issue is fixable.
> And of course there's still all those nasty issue with GFDL like > invariant sections and cover texts that make at least the debian-devel > list believe it's an unfree license..
Only when those sections are used. Which none of those three files do; all that doc is Free (GPL-compatible) by Debian terms. (Modulo minor issues to be worked.)
- Dave
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