Re: [patch] Add semihosting documentation for nios2 and m68k

Hi Sandra,

If documentation is taken verbatim from comments in code, it requires the
copyright license(s) that the code was under.  If on the other hand
you wrote the documentation yourself by looking at/knowing how the code
works, it is yours to license as you want.  If you are taking
comments verbatim from code and it is written by you and other folks, you
can't just license under "any" terms because that doesn't imply permission
of the other
folks unless it uses the license that everyone already agreed upon (which
can be nothing if no license governs the code).

I hope that clarifies.  If a license is required, you can add a separate
license file for each doc file if you don't want the license to be present
in the documentation.

-- Jeff J.



On Tue, Mar 12, 2019 at 8:42 PM Sandra Loosemore <[email protected]>
wrote:

> On 3/12/19 5:15 PM, Jeff Johnston wrote:
> > Hi Sandra,
> >
> > I didn't see any docs for the HOSTED fields in the comments of the
> > libgloss code.  Can you confirm that you didn't grab documentation from
> > elsewhere that has copyright/license issues?  If the source of the docs
> > was covered by the current code licenses for m68k and nios2 they
> > can/should probably be used in the .txt files since the licenses allow
> > for copying of documentation as long as the license is present.
>
> Well, I read the libgloss code too, not just the comments.  Also
> double-checked against the QEMU implementations, the GDB manual, and
> some old internal mailing list discussion.  All of the nios2 and m68k
> semihosting code (both libgloss and QEMU) was originally written by me
> and other CodeSourcery folks, so I think we can license it under any
> terms we want.
>
> Do these documentation files need copyright notices, too?  :-S  That
> didn't occur to me when I wrote them up.
>
> -Sandra
>