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I don't even think git being licensed more permissively (eg, MPL2 or something) would be a bad thing! It would be a net positive for humanity probably. Just, like. Using AI to rewrite and relicense one of the single most-used pieces of GPLed software is actually a declaration of licensing war.

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?

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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.

So this isn't just some random outsider coming in and doing this. This is someone who's been an active member of the developer community around git for a long time. I don't think that's going to make people happier about this situation.

Huh. I thought he was a cofounder since he's listed as one on wikipedia. So either that's wrong or it's one of those late-stage cofounder deals?

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.

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?

You'd probably want to have a chinese wall just so you can prove to the lawyers that you didn't directly take and mechanically translate the original code, and this is kind of the opposite of that.

Copyright is fact-intensive, so until someone takes them to court it's hard to say if this is infringing or not. But from where I'm sitting it seems like an insane legal risk!

Good grief. You've heard of vibe coding, now introducing Vibe Licensing™! Now with 100% more "I really feel like it's..." and "... well, I WANT to!" including up to 400% more quivering bottom lip*. *Bambi eyes an optional subscription-based add-on.