Re: [Xen-devel] [PATCH 1/4] docs/sphinx: License content with CC-BY-4.0

[Lars Kurth <lars.kurth@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On 03/10/2019, 21:56, "Andrew Cooper" <andrew.cooper3@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

    Creative Commons is a more common license than GPL for documentation 
purposes.
    Switch to using CC-BY-4.0 to explicitly permit re-purposing and remixing of
    the content.
    
    Signed-off-by: Andrew Cooper <andrew.cooper3@xxxxxxxxxx>
    ---
    CC: Lars Kurth <lars.kurth@xxxxxxxxxx>
    CC: George Dunlap <George.Dunlap@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
    CC: Ian Jackson <ian.jackson@xxxxxxxxxx>
    CC: Jan Beulich <JBeulich@xxxxxxxx>
    CC: Konrad Rzeszutek Wilk <konrad.wilk@xxxxxxxxxx>
    CC: Stefano Stabellini <sstabellini@xxxxxxxxxx>
    CC: Tim Deegan <tim@xxxxxxx>
    CC: Wei Liu <wl@xxxxxxx>
    CC: Julien Grall <julien@xxxxxxx>
    CC: Rich Persaud <persaur@xxxxxxxxx>
    CC: Juergen Gross <jgross@xxxxxxxx>
    ---
     COPYING                                 |  3 +++
     docs/README.source                      | 32 
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
     docs/admin-guide/index.rst              |  2 ++
     docs/admin-guide/microcode-loading.rst  |  2 ++
     docs/conf.py                            |  1 +
     docs/guest-guide/index.rst              |  2 ++
     docs/guest-guide/x86/hypercall-abi.rst  |  2 ++
     docs/guest-guide/x86/index.rst          |  2 ++
     docs/hypervisor-guide/code-coverage.rst |  2 ++
     docs/hypervisor-guide/index.rst         |  2 ++
     docs/index.rst                          |  2 ++
     11 files changed, 52 insertions(+)
     create mode 100644 docs/README.source
    
    diff --git a/COPYING b/COPYING
    index 310fd52c27..80fac091d3 100644
    --- a/COPYING
    +++ b/COPYING
    @@ -47,6 +47,9 @@ various drivers, support functions and header files 
within Xen-aware
     Linux source trees. In all such cases, license terms are stated at the
     top of the file or in a COPYING file in the same directory.
     
    +Sphinx documentation is licensed under CC-BY 4.0.  See
    +docs/README.source for more specific information.
    +
     In some cases, compatible 3rd party code has been imported into the
     Xen tree, retaining the original license, such as
       - AES-128 3.0
    diff --git a/docs/README.source b/docs/README.source
    new file mode 100644
    index 0000000000..f20fa92c28
    --- /dev/null
    +++ b/docs/README.source
    @@ -0,0 +1,32 @@
    +Sphinx documentation:
    +
    +All source rendered by Sphinx is licensed under CC-BY-4.0.

Sorry for opening this can of worms. 

Although I had seen the discussion between Rich and you about this, I had 
not actually done any groundwork on the licensing. 

So, we have to look at two things:

* Compatibility:
   See 
https://creativecommons.org/2015/10/08/cc-by-sa-4-0-now-one-way-compatible-with-gplv3/
 
   This makes CC-BY-4.0 inbound compatible with GPLv3
   It's not clear to me whether GPLv2 is compatible with CC-BY 4.0: lack of 
publicly
   available information implies this is not the case 

* Output License
   But even if it is, the produced sphinx output would be GPLv2, not CC-BY 4.0
   This would even be true if none of the older GPLv2 docs portions were 
included, as
   the API docs generated from source are GPLv2

As such the statement "All source rendered by Sphinx is licensed under
CC-BY-4.0" is wrong. 

Although it is probably correct to say "All CC-BY 4.0 source rendered by
Sphinx is licensed under CC-BY-4.0", because Sphinx retains the source file
to html mapping and linkage in docs generation works differently
to linkage in code. 

I am wondering whether anyone else has come across this. This question in
particular goes back to Rich who made a very strong case for CC-BY-4.0 based
documentation. I don't think we would have an issue if the entire sphinx doc-set
is GPLv2 if most content is licensed under CC-BY-4.0, except that such an
approach would make re-using the entire sphinx generated docset messy.

We probably also want to maintain the capability to copy text from some
documentation freely into the source tree and vice versa, if needed. This is
particularly true for content in Technical Debt, user content (may end up in
man pages), etc.

Maybe the right approach would be to dually license the documentation
files using both GPLv2 and CC-BY 4.0 and quantifying this in the COPYING
file of the docs directory (starting from a specific date). We could eventually
re-license all the other stuff over time, which should be relatively 
straightforward
and/or exclude specific problematic directories.

Things like standardising say man pages to rst, would potentially also
create complexities with this patch, because of 
    +This includes:
    +  * All ReStructured Text files:          docs/*/*.rst

I don't want this to become a long-winded conversation during the 4.13 freeze.
Please keep this in mind when responding.

It may mean though, that we can't resolve this before 4.13 is released

Regards
Lars

 

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