From: Daniel Barkalow Date: Thu, 27 Jul 2006 19:31:02 GMT Subject: Re: Licensing and the library version of git Message-ID: In-Reply-To: On Thu, 27 Jul 2006, Linus Torvalds wrote: > 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 *This .sig left intentionally blank*