Re: Licensing and the library version of git

On Thu, 27 Jul 2006, Jon Smirl wrote:
> 
> Inability to integrate with Microsoft Visual Studio is going to have a
> lot of impact on the cross platform use of git.  Is a conscious
> decision being made to stop this integration or is this just unplanned
> side effect of the original license? If this is an unplanned side
> effect, the quicker we move, the easier it is to fix.

I don't think the choice of GPLv2 is an "unplanned side effect". It's a 
fact.

I personally don't much like the LGPL.

I'd also like to point out that unlike every single horror I've ever 
witnessed when looking closer at SCM products, git actually has a simple 
design, with stable and reasonably well-documented data structures. In 
fact, I'm a huge proponent of designing your code around the data, rather 
than the other way around, and I think it's one of the reasons git has 
been fairly successful (*).

So it's easy enough to just write whatever Java code or something to just 
access the databases yourself. The object model of git may be smart, but 
it's neither proprietary nor patented. I suspect it's often a lot easier 
to integrate git into other projects _that_ way, rather than try to 
actually port the code itself.

		Linus

(*) I will, in fact, claim that the difference between a bad programmer 
and a good one is whether he considers his code or his data structures 
more important. Bad programmers worry about the code. Good programmers 
worry about data structures and their relationships.