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> we decided that the codebase is not a derivative work that would require carrying forward the GPL license and have decided to release the code under the MIT instead. oh someone wants to get sued.

And git probably has contributors with standing to sue who might have the ideological motive to do so. Also, like. How are you not a derived work? What made you come to that conclusion? Or do you just really WANT to not be?

Since people aren't connecting the dots on this I feel like I need to point out that the author of this post is GitButler's CEO and the same Scott Chacon whose name is proudly displayed as a co-author at git-scm.com/book. He was also a Github cofounder.

that's weird. i knew scott but more importantly i knew the 3 guys who founded github and he wasn't one of them.

yeah the fuck is this. also why would you not just vibe-code whatever missing features into a fork of jj if you want a good vcs written in rust

They did explain their rationale in the post and I think they're being honest (tl;dr gitoxide and libgit2 have longstanding issues around certain kinds of missing functionality that theu want to address and they make no claims this is ready for primetime), but that doesn't make it a good idea.

there is already a rust port of git anyway lol, it's been around forever github.com/gitoxidelabs...

if you, personally, were to port git to rust by hand do you think the gpl would still apply? or is the agent the problem here in your view?

I mean, if you did it after reading the git source code (which the LLMs have definitely trained on) you'd have to exercise a LOT of care to avoid being a derived work, no?

Not so much because I disagree (although I think I probably do) I'm curious as to why permissively licensing git would be a good thing?

1) broadly speaking, we want people to use git and support git. The GPL makes it more difficult to do so even for open-source projects. Basically everyone, open source or no, has to shell out to the git binary instead of using git as a library.

2) As Chacon points out, libgit2 is not a solution. libgit2 is more permissively licensed (although it's still GPL), but because of that it can't take code from git and thus has serious deficiencies in certain areas, networking in particular. This is WHY everyone has to shell out to git.