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

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Message-ID: <7d6c3ce6-a635-8066-924b-3ee41ee34353@leemhuis.info>
Date:   Tue, 24 Nov 2020 14:06:03 +0100
From:   Thorsten Leemhuis <linux@...mhuis.info>
To:     Matthew Wilcox <willy@...radead.org>
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

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