Re: Licensing and the library version of git

From: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
Date: Jul 27, 2006, 16:41 UTC
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.64.0607270936200.4168@g5.osdl.org>
In-Reply-To: <9e4733910607270911p50d25d97w1a898fc7a9119e7d@mail.gmail.com>

On Thu, 27 Jul 2006, Jon Smirl wrote:

Show 6 quoted lines

> 
> Inability to integrate with Microsoft Visual Studio is going to have a
> lot of impact on the cross platform use of git.  Is a conscious
> decision being made to stop this integration or is this just unplanned
> side effect of the original license? If this is an unplanned side
> effect, the quicker we move, the easier it is to fix.

I don't think the choice of GPLv2 is an "unplanned side effect". It's a fact.

I personally don't much like the LGPL.

I'd also like to point out that unlike every single horror I've ever witnessed when looking closer at SCM products, git actually has a simple design, with stable and reasonably well-documented data structures. In fact, I'm a huge proponent of designing your code around the data, rather than the other way around, and I think it's one of the reasons git has been fairly successful (*).

So it's easy enough to just write whatever Java code or something to just access the databases yourself. The object model of git may be smart, but it's neither proprietary nor patented. I suspect it's often a lot easier to integrate git into other projects _that_ way, rather than try to actually port the code itself.

		Linus

(*) I will, in fact, claim that the difference between a bad programmer and a good one is whether he considers his code or his data structures more important. Bad programmers worry about the code. Good programmers worry about data structures and their relationships.