Re: Licensing and the library version of git

From: Petr Baudis <pasky@suse.cz>
Date: Jul 27, 2006, 13:11 UTC
Message-ID: <20060727131127.GA13776@pasky.or.cz>
In-Reply-To: <9e4733910607270554p5622ee20ida8c264cf3122500@mail.gmail.com>

Dear diary, on Thu, Jul 27, 2006 at 02:54:54PM CEST, I got a letter where Jon Smirl <jonsmirl@gmail.com> said that...

> In general libraries should be licensed LGPL to avoid the license
> incompatibility problem. A GPL library forces the main app to be GPL
> too.

But really another main app here (Git) is ending up in the library.

You can still always use the "Git ABI" - the commands. Or you could try having a GPL'd "Git/Eclipse toolkit" which would reduce the barrier to only single exec per Git invocation or something, but it would be probably somewhat tricky on the derived works playground.

> You may like trying to force GPL onto the app but many apps are
> stuck with the license they have and can't be changed since there is
> no way to contact the original developers.

At this point, git-shortlog lists exactly 200 people (at least entries like Unknown or No name are all linux@horizon.com ;-).

-- 
				Petr "Pasky" Baudis
Stuff: http://pasky.or.cz/
Snow falling on Perl. White noise covering line noise.
Hides all the bugs too. -- J. Putnam