Re: Licensing example programs in man-pages (was [PATCH v3] ioctl_tty.2: Add example how to get or set baudrate on the serial port)

["Alejandro Colomar \(man-pages\) via Libc-alpha" <libc-alpha@sourceware.org>]

Hi Greg, Pali,

Hi GregOn 8/5/21 7:54 PM, Greg Kroah-Hartman wrote:
>>> What is the license of this page?
>>
>> .../linux/man-pages$ head -n8 man2/ioctl_tty.2
>> .\" Copyright 2002 Walter Harms <walter.harms@informatik.uni-oldenburg.de>
>> .\" and Andries Brouwer <aeb@cwi.nl>.
>> .\"
>> .\" %%%LICENSE_START(GPL_NOVERSION_ONELINE)
>> .\" Distributed under GPL
> 
> What version of GPL?

I don't know :/
Maybe v1...

> 
>> .\" %%%LICENSE_END
>> .\"
>> .TH IOCTL_TTY 2 2021-03-22 "Linux" "Linux Programmer's Manual"
>>
>> I'm don't know what GPL_NOVERSION_ONLINE is at all.
> 
> I would recommend adding proper SPDX markings to all of these files.
> Even better, work to make the whole repo REUSE compliant which means
> that there is no ambuiguity here.
> 

Agree.  If Michael has no problems with that, I'll add it to my TODO list.

> But, the above license does not show up on the code in the original
> example here, and that needs to be present if anyone wants this to be
> used.

Yup.

> 
>> Still, if the code is going to have a different license than the rest of the
>> page, it could perfectly have an SPDX comment in the first line of the
>> example program.
> 
> Even if it is different, it should still be present as no one can see
> the license of a man page "easily" when reading the documentation
> through normal tools.

Yup.

> 
> thanks,
> 
> greg k-h
> 

Pali,

If you want to specify a specific license for your code, add 2 SPDX 
lines according to REUSE <https://reuse.software/>.  If not, I'll assume 
that you don't care, and when I fix the pages to show the license (which 
in this case I'm not sure which one will be, maybe GPLv1) your code will 
use that same license.  I'll take care of any necessary adjustments such 
as providing  the license text in the repository; you don't need to do that.


Cheers,

Alex


-- 
Alejandro Colomar
Linux man-pages comaintainer; https://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/
http://www.alejandro-colomar.es/