Comment by cmrdporcupine

2 months ago

My question here is not whether it's legally permissible. I'll leave that to others.

It's WTF is wrong with this next generation of devs ? ... that they have such a problem with the GPL that they think it's important to rewrite and relicense and take away a legal structure which is supposed to protect our free software?

I can imagine some concerns with Git being written in C.

I cannot understand any legitimate concerns with its license that it needs to change.

What does the GPL stop people doing with git? And if there are some... why are people trying to do that? And why would you work for free to help people do it? [Edit: I see, you're not working for free.]

Missing an 'f' in the project name.

11 comments

cmrdporcupine

Reply
bryanlarsen  2 months ago

The original git had a command line interface. It's widely assumed that using a GPL'd program in your program through the command line does not cause the GPL to "infect" your program.

OTOH, one of the major reasons for grit is to provide a library interface. If they kept it GPL, anything that used grit through the library interface would have to also become GPL.

This could be the "legitimate concern" you're asking for.

But the LGPL was also an option -- it addresses that arguably legitimate concern and keeps the spirit of the original license.

  • cmrdporcupine  2 months ago

    I mean, yes, clearly, LGPL is the explicitly obvious answer here. And they rejected it.

    • schacon  2 months ago

      Relicensing under any other license, including the LGPL, is exactly the same thing. Either the reimplementation copies protected expression, in which case it would be required to be GPL-2.0-only, or it does not, in which case we can choose the most fitting license.

      If you believe that using an MIT license is not correct, then you defacto also believe that using an LGPL license is not correct.

      2 replies →

johnisgood  2 months ago

GPL makes sure that the code remains open. Seems like these new gen devs are against open source.

  • cmrdporcupine  2 months ago

    It pisses me off because I'm also the author of a rewrite-in-Rust project (though it's more than that, and yes I now use agents though I didn't at the start) and I specifically chose [A|L]GPL for it to protect the IP of the asset and because it felt like the most ethical choice.

  • thewebguyd  2 months ago

    s/open source/free software

    They love open source when it means they can steal from the public and then privatize it later with their VC funded startup, much in the same way Microsoft "loves" Linux [when you run it on Azure, or in WSL]

    What they are against is free/libre software that prevents their grifting.