Re: Licensing and the library version of git

On 7/27/06, Johannes Schindelin [off-list ref] wrote:

Hi,

On Thu, 27 Jul 2006, Petr Baudis wrote:

quoted

And I didn't even get to discussing whether LGPL is actually desirable
for Git.

... or whether it is neccessary for an Eclipse-plugin to something else
than GPL.

Eclipse is not licensed GPL. To use the git library with Eclipse it
would need a JNI wrapper which would link it into the code. The work
around would be to make the user compile and link the JNI wrapper. But
I see that someone is already writing a pure Java version which will
work around the GPL problem assuming the Java version is released
under a compatible license.

In general libraries should be licensed LGPL to avoid the license
incompatibility problem. A GPL library forces the main app to be GPL
too. You may like trying to force GPL onto the app but many apps are
stuck with the license they have and can't be changed since there is
no way to contact the original developers. A GPL git library means
that these apps simply won't use git.

This also means that there will never be integrated git support in
Microsoft Visual Studio. This has impacts on switching cross platform
apps like Mozilla to git.

-- 
Jon Smirl
jonsmirl@gmail.com