Re: [Xen-devel] [RFC] Documentation formats, licenses and file system structure

[Stefano Stabellini <sstabellini@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, 7 Nov 2019, Lars Kurth wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> I have received informal advice
> 
> On 21/10/2019, 06:54, "Artem Mygaiev" <Artem_Mygaiev@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
> 
>     >  Before we ask Xen FuSA contributors to invest in documentation to
>     > be presented as legally-valid evidence for certification, we should
>     > ask a certified lawyer for their formal opinion on the validity of:
>     >     
>     >       (a) applying a source code license (BSD) to documentation
>     > 
>     > There are also BSD documentation license variants which may be worth
>     > looking at
> 
> There is no LEGAL issue with using a source code license for documentation
> Typically, community issues arise when the license is has a patent clause
> which would act as a possible barrier to contributing to the docs (which 
> should be low)
> 
>     >       (b) moving text bidirectionally between source code (BSD) and
>     > documentation (any license)
>     >       (c) moving text bidirectionally between source code (BSD) and
>     > documentation (CC0)
>     >     
>     > I will raise this at the next SIG meeting
> 
> Fundamentally, you can’t move copyrightable content from any CC-BY-4/CC0 to 
> BSD and vice versa without going through the process of changing a license
> 
> On the community call we discussed Andy's sphinx-docs. Andy made a strong 
> case to keep the docset as CC-BY-4
> It rests on the assumption that user docs will always be different from 
> what's in code and thus there is no need to move anything which is 
> copyrightable between code and the docs
> Should that turn out to be wrong, there is still always the possibility of a 
> mixed CC-BY-4 / BSD-2-Clause docset in future
> So we are not painting ourselves into a corner
> 
> Regarding safety related docs, we discussed
> * CC-BY-4 => this is likely to be problematic as many docs are coupled 
> closely with source
> * Dual CC-BY-4 / BSD-2-Clause licensing does not solve this problem
> * BSD-2-Clause docs would enable docs that 
> 
> Thus, the most sensible approach for safety related docs would be to use a 
> BSD-2-Clause license uniformly in that case

I agree with you.

But at that point for simplicity, wouldn't it be better to use BSD-2 for
all docs?

It is difficult to be able to distinguish between "normal docs" and
"safety docs" in all cases. For instance, a description of the Xen
command line options would be required for safety, but might already
exist as docs under CC-BY-4.

What's the advantage with having some docs CC-BY-4, when we need to have
some other docs BSD-2?

(As you know, I don't care about the specific license, I am only trying
to make our life easier.)

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