[cmrdporcupine]

My question here is not whether it's legally permissible. I'll leave that to others.

It's WTF is wrong with this next generation of devs ? ... that they have such a problem with the GPL that they think it's important to rewrite and relicense and take away a legal structure which is supposed to protect our free software?

I can imagine some concerns with Git being written in C.

I cannot understand any legitimate concerns with its license that it needs to change.

What does the GPL stop people doing with git? And if there are some... why are people trying to do that? And why would you work for free to help people do it? [Edit: I see, you're not working for free.]

Missing an 'f' in the project name.

[bryanlarsen]

The original git had a command line interface. It's widely assumed that using a GPL'd program in your program through the command line does not cause the GPL to "infect" your program.

OTOH, one of the major reasons for grit is to provide a library interface. If they kept it GPL, anything that used grit through the library interface would have to also become GPL.

This could be the "legitimate concern" you're asking for.

But the LGPL was also an option -- it addresses that arguably legitimate concern and keeps the spirit of the original license.

[cmrdporcupine]

I mean, yes, clearly, LGPL is the explicitly obvious answer here. And they rejected it.

[schacon]

Relicensing under any other license, including the LGPL, is exactly the same thing. Either the reimplementation copies protected expression, in which case it would be required to be GPL-2.0-only, or it does not, in which case we can choose the most fitting license.

If you believe that using an MIT license is not correct, then you defacto also believe that using an LGPL license is not correct.

[wwallrust]

> Relicensing under any other license, including the LGPL, is exactly the same thing. Either the reimplementation copies protected expression, in which case it would be required to be GPL-2.0-only, or it does not, in which case we can choose the most fitting license.

Using LGPL could help the argument that the project was in good faith, making it more likely to be accepted as non-derivative. Its arguable that the relicinsing would be required to make the project work as a library and so LGPL would be the best choice since that (I assume) preserves most of the terms and intention of the original license. This makes it much easier to show that the license was changed solely to allow other projects to use it as a library.

By using the MIT license its much easier to argue that the project is in bad faith (and potentially derivative), since the license change can be seen as a deliberate choice to remove the protections of the original license. Its harder to argue that the license change was only so the project can be used a library because then you would have used LGPL instead.

(BTW im not a lawyer)

[bryanlarsen]

The OP you're referring to made a distinction between legally and morally correct. Legally, you appear superficially correct, but I'm not a lawyer, and neither was the OP. Morally, the LGPL is correct.

Judges are human and will take into account good faith and attempts to maintain the spirit of the license. Choosing the LGPL signals a desire to maintain the spirit of the license. The MIT signals bad faith. Judges don't like that.

[johnisgood]

GPL makes sure that the code remains open. Seems like these new gen devs are against open source.

[cmrdporcupine]

It pisses me off because I'm also the author of a rewrite-in-Rust project (though it's more than that, and yes I now use agents though I didn't at the start) and I specifically chose [A|L]GPL for it to protect the IP of the asset and because it felt like the most ethical choice.

[johnisgood]

I removed it but I added that I hate these people. :P So yeah, it pisses me off, too.

[cmrdporcupine]

"Don't hate the player, hate the game" as they say.

People want to get paid. They perceive the GPL as getting in their way.

Or, as it is also said: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

[thewebguyd]

s/open source/free software

They love open source when it means they can steal from the public and then privatize it later with their VC funded startup, much in the same way Microsoft "loves" Linux [when you run it on Azure, or in WSL]

What they are against is free/libre software that prevents their grifting.

[johnisgood]

Yeah, pretty much. :)