On Thu, 7 Nov 2019, Lars Kurth wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> I have received informal advice
> 
> On 21/10/2019, 06:54, "Artem Mygaiev" <Artem_Mygaiev@epam.com> wrote:
> 
>     >  Before we ask Xen FuSA contributors to invest in documentation to
>     > be presented as legally-valid evidence for certification, we should
>     > ask a certified lawyer for their formal opinion on the validity of:
>     >     
>     >       (a) applying a source code license (BSD) to documentation
>     > 
>     > There are also BSD documentation license variants which may be worth
>     > looking at
> 
> There is no LEGAL issue with using a source code license for documentation
> Typically, community issues arise when the license is has a patent clause
> which would act as a possible barrier to contributing to the docs (which should be low)
> 
>     >       (b) moving text bidirectionally between source code (BSD) and
>     > documentation (any license)
>     >       (c) moving text bidirectionally between source code (BSD) and
>     > documentation (CC0)
>     >     
>     > I will raise this at the next SIG meeting
> 
> Fundamentally, you can’t move copyrightable content from any CC-BY-4/CC0 to BSD and vice versa without going through the process of changing a license
> 
> On the community call we discussed Andy's sphinx-docs. Andy made a strong case to keep the docset as CC-BY-4
> It rests on the assumption that user docs will always be different from what's in code and thus there is no need to move anything which is copyrightable between code and the docs
> Should that turn out to be wrong, there is still always the possibility of a mixed CC-BY-4 / BSD-2-Clause docset in future
> So we are not painting ourselves into a corner
> 
> Regarding safety related docs, we discussed
> * CC-BY-4 => this is likely to be problematic as many docs are coupled closely with source
> * Dual CC-BY-4 / BSD-2-Clause licensing does not solve this problem
> * BSD-2-Clause docs would enable docs that 
> 
> Thus, the most sensible approach for safety related docs would be to use a BSD-2-Clause license uniformly in that case

I agree with you.

But at that point for simplicity, wouldn't it be better to use BSD-2 for
all docs?

It is difficult to be able to distinguish between "normal docs" and
"safety docs" in all cases. For instance, a description of the Xen
command line options would be required for safety, but might already
exist as docs under CC-BY-4.

What's the advantage with having some docs CC-BY-4, when we need to have
some other docs BSD-2?

(As you know, I don't care about the specific license, I am only trying
to make our life easier.)