On Tue, Jun 01, 2021 at 04:18:46PM -0600, Jonathan Corbet wrote:

Samuel Thibault [off-list ref] writes:

quoted

Jonathan Corbet, le mar. 01 juin 2021 12:53:01 -0600, a ecrit:

quoted

I am concerned about one thing, though: the licensing of this document
is not GPL-compatible, which means we can't build it into the rest of
the docs.

? I see various GFDL-1.1-no-invariants-or-later documentation in
userspace-api/media notably, do they have such build restriction? What
is actually posing problem in the GFDL licence?

Those media docs are separate from the rest of the kernel
documentation.  Other than that, all FDL in Documentation/ was
dual-licensed, last time I checked.

The problem is that the kernel docs, when built, include a great deal of
code and text taken directly from the kernel source.  The built docs are
thus a derived product of the kernel and the result needs to carry a
GPL-compatible license.  I've spent some time talking with lawyers about
this, and they have confirmed that view of things.

This document should not have entered Documentation/ with that license;
had I known this was happening at the time, I would have raised a fuss.
As a standalone .txt file there is probably no legal problem, but that
changes as soon as you bring it into RST TOC tree.

Sorry about this, I totally missed this issue when moving the code out
of staging.

greg k-h