From: Derrick Stolee <stolee@gmail.com>
To: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Cc: 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: Tue, 10 Dec 2019 15:58:20 -0500 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <2ed3e8f1-082d-4eb3-f1f1-e1d184003ced@gmail.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <20191210205056.GA14079@coredump.intra.peff.net>
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@mail.ru> 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
next prev parent reply other threads:[~2019-12-10 20:58 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 [this message]
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
2019-12-15 2:29 ` Jakub Narebski
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