[Celinux-dev] Re: Policy Document (for embedded wiki)

[Paul Mundt]

On Fri, Oct 13, 2006 at 05:19:58PM -0500, Matt Mackall wrote:
> On Fri, Oct 13, 2006 at 02:10:46PM -0700, Tim Bird wrote:
> > Matt Mackall wrote:
> > > b) the GFDL's advantages for our purposes aren't obvious
> > > 
> > >   The protections it gives beyond what the GPL gives are mainly aimed
> > >   at printed works where authorship is a valuable asset (see invariant
> > >   sections), but authorship on wikis is a fairly nebulous concept.
> > I agree.
> 
> I'd like to see a rationale for using the GFDL. I don't know of any
> aside from "Wikipedia does".
> 
I'm curious how this doesn't define a rationale in and of itself. The
fundamental premise behind the embedded linux wiki is to be
complimentary to wikipedia where it makes sense. There's a lot of
content there already, and we don't want to reproduce things needlessly,
especially with regards to licensing.

Likewise, if we have things that are better off being migrated to
wikipedia, then having compatability on the license makes sense.

As far as the code snippet issue is concerned, are we really expecting
the typical use case to be copying and pasting of GPL'ed code to make a
point? Given the context, I would assume that the majority of the
snippets end up being things for abstract purposes, pseudo code, or
config file excerts, none of which is problematic in a GFDL context.

> I'm primarily concerned with the ability to quote non-trivial portions
> of code or text in the text of the wiki. 
> 
> For example, let's say I wanted to put up a page on doing GPIO. It's
> going to be different on every platform, so I'm going to take the
> simple driver I found in arch/arm, quote pretty much the entire thing
> (well beyond "fair use"), and then annotate it, explaining how to
> adapt it to another platform. As I go, I want to quote API bits from
> Documentation/ to an extent that may or may not be fair use.
> 
> The right way to do this sort of thing is not obvious if "text" is
> GFDL and "code" is GPL. The whole page is clearly a derived work, as
> the "text" part can't stand alone. Is the rest of the wiki a derived
> work? Maybe, maybe not.
> 
> With just the GPL, there's no problem.
> 
It's a trade-off in this case, and it really comes down to what we
expect people to be doing with the wiki. If the emphasis will be on
wikipedia interoperability, then a GFDL default is the most
advantageous.

For the use case that you mention, GPLv2 would be the most sensible,
however. This then raises the issue of whether we even want to bother
defining a blanket license for the wiki rather than permitting selection
on a per article basis. (ie, GFDL unless explicitly stated otherwise,
while including a link regarding copy-and-paste in the GPL cases).

Presumably we would also want to use the kernel's take on v2, removing
the "or any later version" noise..