Re: git to libgit2 code relicensing

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Nov 15, 2008, 13:00 UTC
Message-ID: <7vk5b55ekb.fsf@gitster.siamese.dyndns.org>
In-Reply-To: <20081115123916.GN24201@genesis.frugalware.org>

Miklos Vajna <vmiklos@frugalware.org> writes:

Show 15 quoted lines

> On Fri, Nov 14, 2008 at 03:46:58PM -0800, "Shawn O. Pearce" <spearce@spearce.org> wrote:
>>  Note that the only valid version of the GPL as far as this project
>>  is concerned is _this_ particular version of the license (ie v2, not
>>  v2.2 or v3.x or whatever), unless explicitly otherwise stated.
>> 
>>  In addition to the permissions in the GNU General Public License,
>>  the authors give you unlimited permission to link the compiled
>>  version of this file into combinations with other programs,
>>  and to distribute those combinations without any restriction
>>  coming from the use of this file.  (The General Public License
>>  restrictions do apply in other respects; for example, they cover
>>  modification of the file, and distribution when not linked into
>>  a combined executable.)
>
> IANAL - what is the difference between this and the LGPL?

Under LGPL, you must provide linkable object files to your (possibly closed source) program, so that people who made changes to (or obtained an updated version of) a LGPL'ed library can re-link your program and use the updated library. The above does not ask you to do so.

The way I read LGPL is that "We deeply care about our LGPL library and any improvements to it. Although we do not care at all about how your crappy closed source program is written, we want to make sure that the users can keep using your program after improvements are made to our library.". I do not think it makes a practical difference when your program uses the LGPL library as a shard library from that point of view.