Re: Licensing and the library version of git

On Thu, 27 Jul 2006, Jon Smirl wrote:

Inability to integrate with Microsoft Visual Studio is going to have a
lot of impact on the cross platform use of git.  Is a conscious
decision being made to stop this integration or is this just unplanned
side effect of the original license? If this is an unplanned side
effect, the quicker we move, the easier it is to fix.

I don't think the choice of GPLv2 is an "unplanned side effect". It's a 
fact.

I personally don't much like the LGPL.

I'd also like to point out that unlike every single horror I've ever 
witnessed when looking closer at SCM products, git actually has a simple 
design, with stable and reasonably well-documented data structures. In 
fact, I'm a huge proponent of designing your code around the data, rather 
than the other way around, and I think it's one of the reasons git has 
been fairly successful (*).

So it's easy enough to just write whatever Java code or something to just 
access the databases yourself. The object model of git may be smart, but 
it's neither proprietary nor patented. I suspect it's often a lot easier 
to integrate git into other projects _that_ way, rather than try to 
actually port the code itself.

		Linus

(*) I will, in fact, claim that the difference between a bad programmer 
and a good one is whether he considers his code or his data structures 
more important. Bad programmers worry about the code. Good programmers 
worry about data structures and their relationships.