Under what license are Qt's .tags files?
-
To simplify documentation generation, I wish to vendor Qt's .tags files with my project. .tags files are metadata files consumed and generated by QDoc or Doxygen. They are used to link documentation pages together. They do not contain any Qt code, only references.
What conditions do I have to meet to be able to vendor these files? Are they under LGPL-3.0-only or GPL-3.0-only like the rest of Qt (for open source users) even though they do not contain source code?
-
Hi and welcome to devnet,
I think it's a question worth opening a feature request for on the issue tracker. From a quick look at the Qt sources, it seems that files related to the documentation are under
LicenseRef-Qt-Commercial OR GFDL-1.3-no-invariants-only. However I haven't found anywhere an annotation for these generated files. -
Hi and welcome to devnet,
I think it's a question worth opening a feature request for on the issue tracker. From a quick look at the Qt sources, it seems that files related to the documentation are under
LicenseRef-Qt-Commercial OR GFDL-1.3-no-invariants-only. However I haven't found anywhere an annotation for these generated files. -
There's one thing missing in the feature request: adding license information for these files.
The goal being for everybody to have that information. -
There's one thing missing in the feature request: adding license information for these files.
The goal being for everybody to have that information.@SGaist You mean add it to the files directly? I don't think that QDoc is capable of that.
.tagsfiles are just XML, so an XML comment could be added to the header of the file, but that would require an additional post-processing step in the build system. -
The current implementation of
qdocdoes not allow to set a license for these generated files but it is something that could be added if really needed.
In the current case, I was rather thinking about adding an entry to theREUSE.tomlfile to make the information explicit. -
The current implementation of
qdocdoes not allow to set a license for these generated files but it is something that could be added if really needed.
In the current case, I was rather thinking about adding an entry to theREUSE.tomlfile to make the information explicit.@SGaist said in Under what license are Qt's .tags files?:
The current implementation of qdoc does not allow to set a license for these generated files but it is something that could be added if really needed.
I don't know if the output from QDoc can be considered a derivative of the input, and thus copyrightable on its own, or if it is to be considered a transformation only and thus the license that applies to the source also applies to the output. In the former case, yes, we could make QDoc generate e.g. a configurable string; in the latter case, QDoc would need to keep track of license information for everything it parses, which is a much more invasive change. We (the team responsible for maintaining QDoc) consider QDoc a documentation generator, not a license compliance tool, and we aren't planning any such feature.
@meator said in Under what license are Qt's .tags files?:
What conditions do I have to meet to be able to vendor these files? Are they under LGPL-3.0-only or GPL-3.0-only like the rest of Qt (for open source users) even though they do not contain source code?
Our documentation online (html) is made available under LicenseRef-Qt-Commercial OR GFDL-1.3-no-invariants-only, and https://codereview.qt-project.org/c/qt/qtbase/+/674148/1 declares this for QDoc's generated .index and .tags files. However; that REUSE.toml entry won't enforce anything (these files are generated artifacts and not kept in any of Qt's repositories, and REUSE.toml is currently only concerned with files checked into the repository). The entry was made as a declaration of intent. A possible other avenue would be modifying QUIP-18, but as we don't do this for other interim files that are generated by our tools or the toolchain, I opted for the declaration of intent through REUSE.toml. I hope this provides a sufficient answer to your question!
-
@SGaist said in Under what license are Qt's .tags files?:
The current implementation of qdoc does not allow to set a license for these generated files but it is something that could be added if really needed.
I don't know if the output from QDoc can be considered a derivative of the input, and thus copyrightable on its own, or if it is to be considered a transformation only and thus the license that applies to the source also applies to the output. In the former case, yes, we could make QDoc generate e.g. a configurable string; in the latter case, QDoc would need to keep track of license information for everything it parses, which is a much more invasive change. We (the team responsible for maintaining QDoc) consider QDoc a documentation generator, not a license compliance tool, and we aren't planning any such feature.
@meator said in Under what license are Qt's .tags files?:
What conditions do I have to meet to be able to vendor these files? Are they under LGPL-3.0-only or GPL-3.0-only like the rest of Qt (for open source users) even though they do not contain source code?
Our documentation online (html) is made available under LicenseRef-Qt-Commercial OR GFDL-1.3-no-invariants-only, and https://codereview.qt-project.org/c/qt/qtbase/+/674148/1 declares this for QDoc's generated .index and .tags files. However; that REUSE.toml entry won't enforce anything (these files are generated artifacts and not kept in any of Qt's repositories, and REUSE.toml is currently only concerned with files checked into the repository). The entry was made as a declaration of intent. A possible other avenue would be modifying QUIP-18, but as we don't do this for other interim files that are generated by our tools or the toolchain, I opted for the declaration of intent through REUSE.toml. I hope this provides a sufficient answer to your question!
@paulwicking Thanks for the detailed input. Sounds good to me !
-
The licensing documentation also covers this. While it doesn't specifically address the metadata artifacts from QDoc, it states:
Qt documentation is available under commercial licenses from The Qt Company, and under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License (FDL) version 1.3, as published by the Free Software Foundation.
That sets the precedent.
