linux-kernel - Re: [PATCH v3 1/3] LICENSES: Add the CC-BY-4.0 license

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Message-ID: <20201124121109.GY4327@casper.infradead.org>
Date:   Tue, 24 Nov 2020 12:11:09 +0000
From:   Matthew Wilcox <willy@...radead.org>
To:     Thorsten Leemhuis <linux@...mhuis.info>
Cc:     Christoph Hellwig <hch@....de>, Jonathan Corbet <corbet@....net>,
        Randy Dunlap <rdunlap@...radead.org>,
        Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@...uxfoundation.org>,
        linux-doc@...r.kernel.org, linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org,
        Thomas Gleixner <tglx@...utronix.de>
Subject: Re: [PATCH v3 1/3] LICENSES: Add the CC-BY-4.0 license

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.  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.