Re: Approxidate licensing

From: Junio C Hamano <junkio@cox.net>
Date: Oct 10, 2006, 19:23 UTC
Message-ID: <7v64es0ycq.fsf@assigned-by-dhcp.cox.net>
In-Reply-To: <Pine.LNX.4.64.0610101246241.9789@iabervon.org>

Daniel Barkalow <barkalow@iabervon.org> writes:

> Would the three of you agree to license date.c under the LGPL or BSD? It 
> looks like you're the only authors of non-trivial changes [1]. And it seems 
> reasonable to want the date parsing thing under non-GPL terms outside of 
> git.

I do not think I have enough code in there to influence the license of that file, so what I say below does not matter on this particular issue.

The project as a whole is GPLv2 and GPLv2 only, but date.c is isolated enough that I think there are valid form of using it in your program without making your program a derived work. In other words, I do not think I have (even if I had written significant part of it, which I didn't) right to demand to see the rest of your program if you used date.c. I do not think I even have rights to ask about what kind of program it is.

My wishes about the code I write for this project is very simple:

     If you improve my code that had helped you to make it help
     you even better, I would like to have that change back, so
     that your change would help me the same way as it helped
     you.

The readers may have noticed that I have slight problem with GPLv2; in my wish it does not matter if you distribute the result or not. And I am selfish. It is not about helping my users, but about helping me ;-).