I see that the documentation for Suricata is under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International Public License. What exactly is the intent here? Does that mean if I download the code, I can’t read the documentation if I’m a business or is this just a requirement not to resell the documentation? I’d appreciate input as I’d like to make sure I’m complying with the license. (Also, as a side note since the documentation is shipped with the GPL source code, doesn’t the “viral” nature of the license conflict with the doc license?)
The CC license on the documentation is mostly a restriction on republication for commercial use - such as making a book for the purpose of profit. The CC wiki tries to clear this up here, NonCommercial interpretation - Creative Commons, but as usual with licenses it can be a bit unclear.
It is not our intention to prevent commercial or for profit commercial organizations from reading it!
As for the GPL, and the viral nature, that is more about distrubtion of binary artifacts. GPL, and other licensed code and/or documentation can co-exist in the same archive file, git repository, etc without having an effect on each other.
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