From: Shawn O. Pearce Date: Sat, 01 Nov 2008 01:43:36 GMT Subject: Re: libgit2 - a true git library Message-ID: <20081101014336.GI14786@spearce.org> In-Reply-To: Nicolas Pitre wrote: > On Sat, 1 Nov 2008, Pierre Habouzit wrote: > > > See junio's example. It's rather easy to add hooks into the library to > > implement a feature outside of it. It's even possible to do it while > > preserving the ABI fully IMHO (by being a strict superset of it). > > > > The patch would be so trivial, that I see no reason why they wouldn't > > provide it. Though the real implementation of the feature that would be > > delegated through it would be in their closed source stuff. > > But at that point it's a matter of public perception. It would clearly > be against the spirit of the license even though the license itself > couldn't prevent such tortuous practices. Those people doing such > things would clearly be identified as bad guys and get bad press, and > libgit contributors could even attempt law suits based on the derived > work angle. That might be just enough to prevent such things to happen. Yes. > OTOH they would certainly come out clean if the license was BSD since > the spirit of that license explicitly allows closing up the whole > library and adding extra features. My take on the consensus for the license part of the discussion is that libgit2 should be under the "GPL gcc library" license. BTW, I can't actually find a copy of that license; the only thing I can locate in the GCC SVN tree is a copy of the LGPL. -- Shawn.