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Comment by gribbly | Hacker News Reader

Hmmm... in what way does Git being GPL/LGPL cause licence problems for the BSDs ?

I guess you'd want to be able to include it in your distribution. FreeBSD for example includes svn (or svnlite or whatever) so you can fetch/update the source and do a buildkernel or buildworld without having to install any ports.

But you can include Git in the distribution, it's a self-contained program, it's license won't affect anything else it ships alongside with.

    > The FreeBSD Project aims to produce a complete, 
    > BSD-licensed operating system allowing consumers of the
    > system to produce derivative products without constraint
    > or further license obligations.

https://www.freebsd.org/internal/software-license.html

Also https://www.openbsd.org/goals.html and https://www.netbsd.org/about/redistribution.html#why-berkele...

Ok, so it's license philosophy rather than any actual license legality problematics, I can understand that.

If someone wanted to produce a FreeBSD derivative would they really need to be able to ship a modified version of git?

Probably not, but then it wouldn't be "Free".

Suffice to say, FreeBSD's current stance on licensing is that new GPL2 software in base is unacceptable, and the goal is to get to no GPL2 software in base.

It does affect the users' abilities to hack on the software. Since BSDs are used a lot in commercial environments this is a real concern for BSD-hackers.

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