Re: Could /Documentation/technical/commit-graph.txt be relicensed under a permissive license?

From: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Date: Dec 10, 2019, 20:50 UTC
Message-ID: <20191210205056.GA14079@coredump.intra.peff.net>
In-Reply-To: <70575b23-6adb-a29b-8df8-f9099f86eb0e@gmail.com>

On Tue, Dec 10, 2019 at 03:38:35PM -0500, Derrick Stolee wrote:

Show 5 quoted lines

> On 12/10/2019 3:10 PM, Junio C Hamano wrote:
> > KOLANICH <kolan_n@mail.ru> writes:
> 
> I don't appear to have the original message? Perhaps it was
> directly addressed to Junio?

It made it to me via the list, too.

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> > GPL copyright protects the expression of the document, but the
> > copyright protects only the expression, and does not protect the
> > underlying format itself and the idea behind it.  So I do not see a
> > need to relicense the documentation text at all.
> 
> (Insert "I am not a lawyer" warning.)
> 
> I think this is the correct interpretation. One can interact with
> binary files as you want. In fact, there are likely privately
> licensed products that interact with Git's pack-files even though
> their format documentation is under GPL.
> 
> What _could_ be problematic is repeating the documentation directly
> in another permissive-licensed repository.

That's my understanding as well. That said, I would not be opposed to some kind of statement in the documentation making our view explicit.

-Peff