Pau Garcia i Quiles wrote:
Shawn posted the exact text. The spirit of that license is that anyone can
use an unmodified version of the library for whatever they want, but it's
illegal to link non-GPL software to an altered version of the library. That
is, the git community will get all changes back while other projects can
use the official version of the library without having to worry about
licensing issues. EvilCompany cannot make changes to the library and then
link non-GPL'd software to their changed version. They can do that if they
send their library changes upstream and then only use them once they're
considered "official" though.
Do you mean if I write a patch to libgit2, send it upstream and make
it public on my website but it is not accepted upstream, I cannot link
my modified libgit2 version (i. e. libgit2 + my patch) to my non-GPL
software?
I think that's the case, yes.
It looks insane to me: I wrote the patch and made it public
but you guys did not accept it!
Well, if you wrote a patch that uses a closed-source database library
to store git objects in, how would that benefit the community even if
you published the patch?
You could ofcourse fork the library, but then you'd have to take care
of namespace conflicts and such things. The fork would naturally have
to be licensed GPL + gcc-exception too, since it's a derivative work.
--
Andreas Ericsson andreas.ericsson@xxxxxx
OP5 AB www.op5.se
Tel: +46 8-230225 Fax: +46 8-230231
--
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe git" in
the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
