Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S262318AbTFOPst (ORCPT ); Sun, 15 Jun 2003 11:48:49 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S262319AbTFOPst (ORCPT ); Sun, 15 Jun 2003 11:48:49 -0400 Received: from mta6.snfc21.pbi.net ([206.13.28.240]:31877 "EHLO mta6.snfc21.pbi.net") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S262318AbTFOPss (ORCPT ); Sun, 15 Jun 2003 11:48:48 -0400 Date: Sun, 15 Jun 2003 09:05:26 -0700 From: David Brownell Subject: Re: GFDL in the kernel tree In-reply-to: <20030615140758.A9390@infradead.org> To: Christoph Hellwig Cc: torvalds@transmeta.com, mochel@osdl.org, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Message-id: <3EEC9946.9090308@pacbell.net> MIME-version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-transfer-encoding: 7BIT X-Accept-Language: en-us, en, fr User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.2.1) Gecko/20030225 References: <20030615140758.A9390@infradead.org> Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Content-Length: 1733 Lines: 44 Christoph Hellwig wrote: > 2.5.71 introduces two GFDL-licensed files in the kernel tree... A "grep" in Documentation/DocBook shows me three GFDL files, last time I grepped there were none. So I was aware that adding one would likely raise some issues ... evidently a variety of people have noticed that GPL for docs/specs isn't the best solution. > (2) Documentation/DocBook/gadget.tmpl, one of the files, includes > extracted from source files licensed under GPL, making this > a GPL license violation. Almost all of that is covered by a "GFDL Exception"; see the top of . I can submit a patch to do the same for one other file (usbstring.c, one function). But there's a potential issue for kerneldoc for one particular structure, "usb_ctrlrequest", which was merged into 2.5 from a patch on 2/2/2002 ... I think I know who contributed that patch. If that author isn't willing to let that text be covered by GFDL, and for some reason I can't replace it with similar text that is (mostly pointing to the USB spec for details), I'll pull that bit out. In short: This particular issue is fixable. > And of course there's still all those nasty issue with GFDL like > invariant sections and cover texts that make at least the debian-devel > list believe it's an unfree license.. Only when those sections are used. Which none of those three files do; all that doc is Free (GPL-compatible) by Debian terms. (Modulo minor issues to be worked.) - Dave - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/