Re: Licensing and the library version of git

From: Jon Smirl <jonsmirl@gmail.com>
Date: Jul 27, 2006, 12:54 UTC
Message-ID: <9e4733910607270554p5622ee20ida8c264cf3122500@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <Pine.LNX.4.63.0607271400160.29667@wbgn013.biozentrum.uni-wuerzburg.de>

On 7/27/06, Johannes Schindelin <Johannes.Schindelin@gmx.de> wrote:

Show 9 quoted lines

> Hi,
>
> On Thu, 27 Jul 2006, Petr Baudis wrote:
>
> > And I didn't even get to discussing whether LGPL is actually desirable
> > for Git.
>
> ... or whether it is neccessary for an Eclipse-plugin to something else
> than GPL.

Eclipse is not licensed GPL. To use the git library with Eclipse it would need a JNI wrapper which would link it into the code. The work around would be to make the user compile and link the JNI wrapper. But I see that someone is already writing a pure Java version which will work around the GPL problem assuming the Java version is released under a compatible license.

In general libraries should be licensed LGPL to avoid the license incompatibility problem. A GPL library forces the main app to be GPL too. 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. A GPL git library means that these apps simply won't use git.

This also means that there will never be integrated git support in Microsoft Visual Studio. This has impacts on switching cross platform apps like Mozilla to git.

-- 
Jon Smirl
jonsmirl@gmail.com