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.
