Re: git to libgit2 code relicensing

From: Nicolas Pitre <nico@cam.org>
Date: Nov 15, 2008, 08:04 UTC
Message-ID: <alpine.LFD.2.00.0811150256140.27509@xanadu.home>
In-Reply-To: <20081115050039.GC2932@spearce.org>

On Fri, 14 Nov 2008, Shawn O. Pearce wrote:

Show 19 quoted lines

> David Brown <git@davidb.org> wrote:
> > On Fri, Nov 14, 2008 at 03:46:58PM -0800, Shawn O. Pearce wrote:
> >
> >> In addition to the permissions in the GNU General Public License,
> >> the authors give you unlimited permission to link the compiled
> >> version of this file into combinations with other programs,
> >> and to distribute those combinations without any restriction
> >> coming from the use of this file.  (The General Public License
> >> restrictions do apply in other respects; for example, they cover
> >> modification of the file, and distribution when not linked into
> >> a combined executable.)
> >
> > Is this license intended to allow static linking but forbid dynamic
> > linking into a non-GPL program?  It depends on how you interpret
> > "linked into a combined executable", but that sounds like it
> > intentionally excludes the dynamic case.
> 
> I don't know.  When I read it myself I assumed dynamic linking
> would also be OK.

libgcc is a dynamic library on most modern systems these days. Yet they routinely execute non-GPL programs. If that text intentionally excluded the dynamic case then every non-GPL applications on such systems would have been breaking the license for a long time. So I don't think anyone could have substance for such a claim.

Nicolas