On 12/10/2019 3:50 PM, Jeff King wrote: > On Tue, Dec 10, 2019 at 03:38:35PM -0500, Derrick Stolee wrote: > >> On 12/10/2019 3:10 PM, Junio C Hamano wrote: >>> KOLANICH <kolan_n@xxxxxxx> writes: >> >> I don't appear to have the original message? Perhaps it was >> directly addressed to Junio? > > It made it to me via the list, too. Hm... I have had messages from the list be delayed somehow by Gmail. >>> 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. > > That's my understanding as well. That said, I would not be opposed to > some kind of statement in the documentation making our view explicit. A similar statement could apply to the following files: Documentation/technical/bitmap-format.txt Documentation/technical/commit-graph-format.txt Documentation/technical/http-protocol.txt Documentation/technical/index-format.txt Documentation/technical/long-running-process-protocol.txt Documentation/technical/pack-format.txt Documentation/technical/pack-protocol.txt Documentation/technical/protocol-capabilities.txt Documentation/technical/protocol-common.txt Documentation/technical/protocol-v2.txt and perhaps others, including future additions. Would it be better to have a new file in Documentation/technical/ that describes this view? -Stolee
