Attention is currently required from: Alexander Goncharov, Anastasia Klimchuk, Stefan Reinauer, Thomas Heijligen.
Patrick Georgi has posted comments on this change. ( https://review.coreboot.org/c/flashrom/+/75727?usp=email )
Change subject: doc: Add documentation license ......................................................................
Patch Set 3:
(3 comments)
Patchset:
PS1:
Marking as unresolved, so that Patrick could have a look and confirm.
This should be enough: it shows intent, it avoids surprises, and it's not an overly big burden to look for a file whose name contains "license" if you're curious. If you want to apply some extra care, also add the license text as Documentation/COPYING to make it extra clear that this subdirectory isn't covered by top-level's COPYING anymore.
You'll always find a lawyer who will disagree, but if we go by that metric, we couldn't do anything at all: As such, coreboot is just winging it, and flashrom gets to enjoy the same level of uncertainty. Over the years coreboot got some request about this-or-that licensing clarification but never about the docs - this either means, that nobody cared for that part or that it's alright. Same for flashrom.
File doc/documentation_license.rst:
https://review.coreboot.org/c/flashrom/+/75727/comment/0a0fc3f7_06530025 : PS3, Line 2: flashrom documentation license
Initially I copied from coreboot's page https://doc.coreboot.org/documentation_license. […]
I don't think it's critical. The important bit is "documentation" (so nobody gets the idea that this license applies to flashrom), but other than that, it doesn't matter too much what title to use.
https://review.coreboot.org/c/flashrom/+/75727/comment/68aafd17_1e26d26e : PS3, Line 5: doc/
`Documentation` directory is probably under GPLv2 which is what everything in the tree was. […]
The way we did it for coreboot (and its wiki) was that every time we found a useful nugget of information on the wiki and wanted to transfer it, we dug in its history and asked its authors.
If they all agree, prepare a change to copy the text over to Documentation/, mention the relicensing situation in the commit message, have the authors sign off on it in Gerrit (which translates over into the finally submitted commit message, making it part of the permanent record).
You could do the same with Documentation/ -> doc/ for valuable (i.e. not obsolete) texts.
Sometimes there's some eyeballing going on: not every contribution is actually copyrightable, for example simply reformatting the text, akin to calling `fmt -80`, won't need approval to take over the complete work, but if in doubt, ask.
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Patrick Georgi (Code Review)