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Re:Commons Clause by lmm on Wednesday August 22, 2018 @05:26AM (#17817438)
Whether TortoiseGit is a derivative work of Git is ultimately a legal question. Certainly just being a separate binary doesn't automatically make it not one. "You could replace the git client with one that has the same interface and it would still work." - that's true of any library used in any program.
Re:Commons Clause by yebyen on Wednesday August 22, 2018 @08:49AM (#17818304)
It seems like the point has been lost.

Unless you're building (as your company's product) a Git client based on Git, then the license of Git is irrelevant. It does not enter into the question of how you must license your product when you publish it.

Most people who have chosen to include Git in their development stack don't suffer any consequence from the fact that it is licensed as GPLv2. TortoiseGit is another matter altogether – ~in fact it must be licensed as GPLv2, because it links to libgit2. If it was changed to wrap the Git binary instead, then what you say is probably true.~ (this is false, [1] libgit2 is licensed as GPLv2 with the Linking Exception. So clients that link to it need not be licensed as GPLv2.)

But most of us Git users are not actually building Git clients.

[1]: https://github.com/libgit2/libgit2/issues/3046