Re: Licensing and the library version of git

From: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
Date: Jul 27, 2006, 17:07 UTC
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.64.0607271003270.4168@g5.osdl.org>
In-Reply-To: <Pine.LNX.4.63.0607271846390.8976@alpha.polcom.net>

On Thu, 27 Jul 2006, Grzegorz Kulewski wrote:

> 
> I think that part of the anwser for question "Why do people use GIT?" is that
> they trust you and other maintainers that you do a good and stable job. Won't
> creating several ports/forks/whatever destroy at least part of this?

Sure. But the point is, the GPLv2 isn't exactly up for discussion. People can complain all they want, but if they want to trust me, they'll take the GPLv2. It's that easy.

And if people don't want the GPLv2, they have alternatives as outlined. Yes, their code will be less reliable and good, but hey, that's kind of my _point_. A lot of the quality of open source projects comes from the fact that you see how it gets used, and the LGPL is strictly inferior, because it ends up hiding all the _important_ parts behind a veil of impenetrable secrecy.

Quite frankly, I don't want to see bug-reports and interfaces that I can't actually duplicate and follow myself. I'm so _totally_ uninterested in those kinds of things that it's not even funny.

			Linus