Re: Could /Documentation/technical/commit-graph.txt be relicensed under a permissive license?

Derrick Stolee [off-list ref] writes:

On 12/10/2019 3:10 PM, Junio C Hamano wrote:

quoted

KOLANICH [off-list ref] writes:

[...]

quoted

quoted

... the license of git itself is GPL, so I am not
allowed to use these 2 files to create an own permissive-licensed
tool reading this file. 

It is a wrong conclusion, isn't it?

GPL copyright protects the expression of the document, but the
copyright protects only the expression, and does not protect the
underlying format itself and the idea behind it.  So I do not see a
need to relicense the documentation text at all.

(Insert "I am not a lawyer" warning.)

I think this is the correct interpretation. One can interact with
binary files as you want. In fact, there are likely privately
licensed products that interact with Git's pack-files even though
their format documentation is under GPL.

What _could_ be problematic is repeating the documentation directly
in another permissive-licensed repository.

Sidenote: I wonder if JGit, which is permissively-licensed (EDL,
i.e. new-style BSD) pure-Java implementation of Git, makes use of commit
graph.

I remember that pack bitmaps came to Git from JGit, where that feature
was first implemented.

Best,
--
Jakub Narębski