From: Thorsten Leemhuis <linux@leemhuis.info>
To: Matthew Wilcox <willy@infradead.org>
Cc: Christoph Hellwig <hch@lst.de>, Jonathan Corbet <corbet@lwn.net>,
Randy Dunlap <rdunlap@infradead.org>,
Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>,
linux-doc@vger.kernel.org, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org,
Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>
Subject: Re: [PATCH v3 1/3] LICENSES: Add the CC-BY-4.0 license
Date: Tue, 24 Nov 2020 14:06:03 +0100 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <7d6c3ce6-a635-8066-924b-3ee41ee34353@leemhuis.info> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <20201124121109.GY4327@casper.infradead.org>
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
next prev parent reply other threads:[~2020-11-24 13:06 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 14+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2020-11-24 8:00 [PATCH v3 0/3] New documentation text describing how to report issues (aka "reporting-bugs rewritten") Thorsten Leemhuis
2020-11-24 8:00 ` [PATCH v3 1/3] LICENSES: Add the CC-BY-4.0 license Thorsten Leemhuis
2020-11-24 9:18 ` Christoph Hellwig
2020-11-24 9:31 ` Thorsten Leemhuis
2020-11-24 9:36 ` Christoph Hellwig
2020-11-24 10:07 ` Thorsten Leemhuis
2020-11-24 12:11 ` Matthew Wilcox
2020-11-24 13:06 ` Thorsten Leemhuis [this message]
2020-11-30 14:51 ` Jonathan Corbet
2020-12-01 14:43 ` Christoph Hellwig
2020-12-01 20:45 ` Thorsten Leemhuis
2020-11-26 10:11 ` Thorsten Leemhuis
2020-11-24 8:00 ` [PATCH v3 2/3] docs: Add a new text describing how to report bugs Thorsten Leemhuis
2020-11-24 8:00 ` [PATCH v3 3/3] docs: make reporting-bugs.rst obsolete Thorsten Leemhuis
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