GitKraken: git GUI Client for Windows Mac and Linux

Re:GitKraken: git GUI Client for Windows Mac and Linux by radarsat1 on Wednesday March 02, 2016 @08:29AM (#11209749)

Which is weird, seeing as the git license is GPL 2. I mean, I find it weird that one can build a product completely around a GPL project, and somehow not make it GPL. The whole point of the GPL is to restrict derivatives. Yet, somehow this has been mutated to become "links to a library," as if the technical fact that the product links to some code over an API boundary is different, legally speaking, than calling it with arguments over a process boundary.

The point of the GPL was supposed to be about derivative products, that is code that depends non-optionally on other code. Whether it depends on that code via linking, calling exec(), or sending HTTP requests, it shouldn't be legal to write a non-open-source application that depends on a GPL program to do anything useful.

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Re:GitKraken: git GUI Client for Windows Mac and Linux by dragonwriter on Wednesday March 02, 2016 @08:37AM (#11209787)

Legal derivative works under copyright law of a particular computer program are not the same thing as programs which functionally interact with them -- functional interaction doesn't make a work derivative.

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Re:GitKraken: git GUI Client for Windows Mac and Linux by radarsat1 on Wednesday March 02, 2016 @03:21PM (#11212700)

But what if the entire core functionality of the program relies on an open source program? This is the case here, I would argue.

ps. I realize that in a technical sense my comment is "wrong", hence the downvotes, but what I'm getting at is, doesn't this horribly break the spirit of the GPL?

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