Re: [Xen-devel] [RFC] Documentation formats, licenses and file system structure

[Stefano Stabellini <sstabellini@kernel.org>]

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On Fri, 11 Oct 2019, Lars Kurth wrote:
> On 11/10/2019, 02:24, "Stefano Stabellini" <sstabellini@kernel.org> wrote:
> 
>     On Thu, 10 Oct 2019, Lars Kurth wrote:
>     > * Would we ever include API docs generated from GPLv2 code? E.g. for safety use-cases?
>     > @Stefano, @Artem: I guess this one is for you. 
>     > I suppose if we would have a similar issue for a safety manual
>     > I am also assuming we would want to use sphinx docs and rst to generate a future safety manual
>     
>     Hi Lars,
>     
>     Thanks for putting this email together.
>     
>     In terms of formats, I don't have a preference between rst and pandoc,
>     but if we are going to use rst going forward, I'd say to try to use rst
>     for everything, including converting all the old stuff. The fewer
>     different formats, the better.
> 
> I think the proposal that needs to follow on from this (which would at some
> point need to be voted on) would then be to go for rst. 
>     
>     As I mentioned during the FuSa call, I agree with you, Andrew, and
>     others that it would be best to have the docs under a CC license. I do
>     expect that we'll end up copy/pasting snippets of in-code comments into
>     the docs, so I think it is important that we are allowed to do that from
>     a license perspective. It is great that GPLv2 allows it (we need to be
>     sure about this).
> 
> The GPL does *not* allow this, but (c) law and fair use clauses do. So typically
> stuff such as
> * Referring to function names, signatures, etc. tend to be all fine
> * Copying large portions of in-line comments would not be fine, but
> If they are large, they would in most cases be re-written in a more suitable
> language. 
> 
> So, I think overall, we should be fine. It's a bit of a grey area though.
> 
> And as you point out below, most of the code in question is typically BSD 
>     
>     Yes, I expect that some docs might be automatically generated, but from
>     header files, not from source code. Especailly public/ header files,
>     which are typically BSD, not GPLv2. I cannot come up with examples of
>     docs we need to generated from GPLv2-only code at the moment, hopefully
>     there won't be any.
>     
> That makes things a lot easier.    
>          
>     >     I wasn't planning on reusing any of the markup, and wasn't expecting to
>     >     use much of the text either.  I'm still considering the option of
>     >     defining that xen/public/* isn't the canonical description of the ABI,
>     >     because C is the wrong tool for the job.
>     >     
>     >     Its fine to provide a C set of headers implementing an ABI, but there is
>     >     a very deliberate reason why the canonical migration v2 spec is in a
>     >     text document.
>     > 
>     > @Stefano: as you and I believe Brian will be spending time on improving the
>     > ABI docs, I think we need to build some agreement here on what/how
>     > to do it. I was assuming that generally the consensus was to have
>     > docs close to the code in source, but this does not seem to be the case.
>     > 
>     > But if we do have stuff separately, ideally we would have a tool that helps
>     > point people editing headers to also look at the relevant docs. Otherwise it will
>     > be hard to keep them in sync.
>     
>     In general, it is a good idea to keep the docs close to the code to make
>     it easier to keep them up to date. But there is no one-size-fits-all
>     here. For public ABI descriptions, I agree with Andrew that ideally they
>     should not be defined as C header files.
>     
>     But it is not an issue: any work that we do here won't be wasted. For
>     instance, we could start by adding more comments to the current header
>     files. Then, as a second step, take all the comments and turn them into
>     a proper ABI description document without any C function declarations.
>     It is easy to move English text around, as long as the license allows it
>     -- that is the only potential blocker I can see.
> 
> This is likely to be problematic. First of all, we are talking about BSD-3-Clause
> or BSD-2-Clause code (the latter is more dominant in headers I believe) in
> all known cases.
> 
> The main properties of the BSD are
> 1: Can be pretty much used anywhere for any purpose
> 2: Can be modified for any purpose 
> 3: But the original license header must be retained in derivates
> 
> Does *not* have requirements around attribution as CC-BY-4: however,
> as we store everything in git attribution is handled by us by default
> 
> CC-BY-4 also has properties 1-3
> In addition: it does require that 
> 4: Derived works are giving appropriate credit to authors 
>     We could clarify in a COPYING how we prefer to do this
>     4.1: We could say that "referring to the Xen Project community" 
>             is sufficient to comply with the attribution clause
>     4.2: We could require individual authors to be credited: in that
>             case we probably ought to lead by example and list the authors
>             in a credit/license section and extract the information from
>             git logs when we generate it (at some point in the future)
> 5: You give an indication whether you made changes ... in practice
> this means you have to state significant changes made to the works
> 
> As such, BSD-2/3-Clause in our context works similarly to CC-BY-4
> from a downstream's perspective. In fact CC-BY-4 is somewhat stricter
> 
> This seems to say to me that the most pragmatic way forward is to create 
> these new ABI documents under BSD-2/3-Clause and accept that the
> produced work is not fully CC-BY-4 (but in all practical terms behaves
> as if it were). The only downside I can see is a slightly less pure
> COPYING, README or credit/license section in the generated document
> but for practical use there is no actual difference.

FWIW I am OK with this. In fact, I think it is a good idea because it
does look like that it will make comments and text easier to move
around, which far overcome the small downside.

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