This is not GPLv2 fault, sorry...

Posted Aug 12, 2009 12:36 UTC (Wed) by SEMW (guest, #52697)
In reply to: This is not GPLv2 fault, sorry... by khim
Parent article: A new GCC runtime library license snag?

> Git's developer's decision created problem few years down the road - but it's not like they had no warning: indeed, the warning is embedded in the very text of the license they've used!

Being there and being apparent are very different things. The current problem is as a result of an interaction between the gcc runtime exception and the GPLv2 that, whilst it was in a trivial sense there all along, no-one had noticed until Kalle Niemitalo pointed it out very recently. (If I am mistaken and it was, in fact, known before, please say so; as I said in the other thread, the story does not give that impression).

You can study ZFC for quite a while without deducing Fermat's last theorem, even though it is a logical consequence of them. And the fact that the two licenses interact in this way might have been there all along, but it was apparently sufficiently non-obvious that, yes, the git developers could certainly be said to have had no warning.