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

[Lars Kurth <lars.kurth@xxxxxxxxxx>]

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

Regards
Lars

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