Re: Licensing and the library version of git

From: Daniel Barkalow <barkalow@iabervon.org>
Date: Jul 27, 2006, 19:31 UTC
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.64.0607271457250.9789@iabervon.org>
In-Reply-To: <Pine.LNX.4.64.0607271003270.4168@g5.osdl.org>

On Thu, 27 Jul 2006, Linus Torvalds wrote:

Show 9 quoted lines

> 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.

I think there'd be a justification for licensing part of git like sparse is licensed, for the same reasons. It wouldn't include any of the interesting operations, probably, but it would be worth having a canonical implementation of reading and writing the data structures, so other implementations don't screw that up. I wouldn't like to have someone write a version that generated subtly corrupt git objects that it accepts along with proper objects, such that we have to work around the breakage. It's a bit less likely to happen if there's no licensing reason not to use the same code.

	-Daniel
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