From: "brian m. carlson" <sandals@crustytoothpaste.net>
To: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Cc: Derrick Stolee <stolee@gmail.com>,
Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>, KOLANICH <kolan_n@mail.ru>,
git@vger.kernel.org, Derrick Stolee <dstolee@microsoft.com>,
Elijah Newren <newren@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: Could /Documentation/technical/commit-graph.txt be relicensed under a permissive license?
Date: Fri, 13 Dec 2019 00:58:20 +0000 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <20191213005820.GD1334263@camp.crustytoothpaste.net> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <20191210205056.GA14079@coredump.intra.peff.net>
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On 2019-12-10 at 20:50:56, Jeff King wrote:
> On Tue, Dec 10, 2019 at 03:38:35PM -0500, Derrick Stolee wrote:
>
> > (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.
This is consistent with my interpretation as well. I view the
documentation as a specification, and implementers are free to license
their software as they see fit. They need only comply with the GPL if
they wish to copy, modify, or distribute the documentation itself (or
other parts of Git).
I see this exactly as the situation with RFCs (e.g., TCP): they are
documentation licensed under non-free terms, but there are multiple
independent implementations of those RFCs under different terms (Linux,
FreeBSD, and Windows, for example). The license terms of the RFCs apply
only to those documents, not the implementations.
--
brian m. carlson: Houston, Texas, US
OpenPGP: https://keybase.io/bk2204
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next prev parent reply other threads:[~2019-12-13 0:58 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 11+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2019-12-10 19:31 Could /Documentation/technical/commit-graph.txt be relicensed under a permissive license? KOLANICH
2019-12-10 20:10 ` Junio C Hamano
2019-12-10 20:38 ` Derrick Stolee
2019-12-10 20:50 ` Jeff King
2019-12-10 17:18 ` Ed Maste
2019-12-10 20:58 ` Derrick Stolee
2019-12-10 22:20 ` Junio C Hamano
2019-12-11 0:36 ` KOLANICH
2019-12-11 12:57 ` Johannes Schindelin
2019-12-13 0:58 ` brian m. carlson [this message]
2019-12-15 2:29 ` Jakub Narebski
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