Re: [PATCH 0/4] faster SHA-1 collision detection

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Oct 8, 2026, 17:10 UTC
Message-ID: <xmqqece015k1.fsf@gitster.g>
In-Reply-To: <CALnO6CBbtKomawqc81MPV5Ngtc9J3M1ej4enGD3ZUzWnPSfsgw@mail.gmail.com>

"D. Ben Knoble" <ben.knoble@gmail.com> writes:

> but I didn't see a discussion of licensing at that time. Perhaps the
> idea is that we are clear that such code carries a different license
> from Git?

We are GPL-2 only, which means we can incorporate BSD-licensed software as long as we satisfy its license and copyright notice requirements.

The above is not an AI-bot-supplied answer, but what one learns when talking to copyright lawyers or reading books on software licensing.

But sometimes asking LLM gives sufficiently useful answer.  I typed

"Is GPLv2 compatible with BSD?"

in the search bar of a browser, and here is the early part of what I got, which is not too bad.

    * AI summary

    Yes, GPLv2 is generally compatible with modern BSD (2-clause and
    3-clause) licenses, though the direction of the combination
    matters.

    Compatibility Details

    • BSD inside GPLv2: You can include a 2-clause or 3-clause
      BSD-licensed library or code snippet inside a GPLv2-licensed
      project. The resulting combined work must be distributed under
      the terms of the GPLv2.

    • GPLv2 inside BSD: You cannot take GPLv2-licensed code and
      place it into a purely BSD-licensed project. Because the GPLv2
      is a strong copyleft license, it forces the entire combined
      work to be covered by the GPLv2.