Subject: Re: [PATCH 0/9] Get svnrdump merged into git.git

From: Stefan Sperling <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 14 Jul 2010 14:55:05 +0200

On Wed, Jul 14, 2010 at 01:26:20PM +0200, Ramkumar Ramachandra wrote:
> Stefan Sperling writes:
> > I didn't catch any licensing discussion. What's the issue?
> 
> I guess there's no issue then- sorry, I know close to nothing about
> licensing.

Well, the only theoretical issue I can see is that the FSF says that
the GPLv2 was incompatible with the Apache 2.0 licence.
See http://www.apache.org/licenses/GPL-compatibility.html

So if git distributed their own version of svnrdump licensed under GPLv2,
depending on who you believe, distributors of Git binaries would violate
the GPLv2 by linking svnrdump to the Subversion libraries.

Mercurial recently switched to GPLv3 for this reason. They have code
that uses Subversion's Python bindings. They made this switch on their
own accord, however, after consulting the Software Freedom Law Center.
The Subversion project itself was not involved in that decision.

Possible workarounds are simply ignoring the FSF, or distributing all
copies of svnrdump under Apache 2.0 or GPLv3 (but the svnrdump included
in Subversion itself must be licensed under Apache 2.0).

Stefan