Messages in this thread | | | From | Thorsten Leemhuis <> | Subject | Re: [PATCH v3 1/3] LICENSES: Add the CC-BY-4.0 license | Date | Tue, 24 Nov 2020 14:06:03 +0100 |
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Am 24.11.20 um 13:11 schrieb Matthew Wilcox: > On Tue, Nov 24, 2020 at 11:07:41AM +0100, Thorsten Leemhuis wrote: >> There is nothing special with this text, it's just that GPL is known to not >> be really ideal for documentation. That makes it hard for people to reuse >> parts of the docs outside of the kernel context, say in books or on >> websites. But it IMHO would be good for us if others could simply use this >> text as a base in such places. Otherwise they'd often face a situation where >> they had to write something completely new themselves, which afsics often >> leads to texts that can be incomplete, inaccurate or actually missleading. >> That can lead to bad bug reports, which is annoying both for reporters and >> kernel developers. >> >> That's why I came up with the thought "make the text available under more >> liberal license in addition to the GPLv2 is a good idea here". I considered >> MIT, but from what I see CC-BY 4.0 is a way better choice for documentation >> that is more known to authors. >> >> And I hope others pick up the idea when they write new documentation for the >> kernel, so maybe sooner or later it's not unusual anymore. > > It's really tricky to make this work when, eg, including kernel-doc from > files which are unambiguously licensed under the GPL.
Yeah, I'm aware of that and see the risk. But the text I proposed does not include anything from other files (apart from titles), so is this risk a problem for this case? Or just something you fear might become a problem when other texts in the documentation start to use CC-BY without thinking it through?
And the processed text at no point mentions its license, so people can't redistribute it anyway. Only the source file mentions it, where nothing is included.
> I'd be happy to > sign up to licensing the files I control under GPL-with-CC-BY-SA-exception > that said something like "any documentation extracted from this file may > be distributed under the BY-SA license", but I'm not sure everybody would.
I tend to say discussing steps like that is better left for a point of time when somebody actually wants to use BY-SA for the documentation and include kernel-doc from source files at the same time.
Ciao, Thorsten
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