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
