Re: Can I use CRoaring library in Git?

["Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason" <avarab@gmail.com>]

On Sat, Jul 16 2022, Abhradeep Chakraborty wrote:

> Hello,
>
> I need the CRoaring[1] library to use roaring bitmaps. But it has
> Apache license v2 which is not compatible with GPLv2[2].
>
> Is there a way to use the CRoaring library in Git? Taylor told me that
> contrib/persistent-https tree is also licensed under Apache License
> version 2.
>
> [1] https://github.com/RoaringBitmap/CRoaring
> [2] https://www.apache.org/licenses/GPL-compatibility.html

As a replacement for git's own bitmap implementation?

It's one thing to have differently licensed code in-tree that's built as
a separate utility (like that persistent-https tool), but another if
this is going to be something linked to git itself.

My understanding is that such a thing could not be legally distributed
as a binary (e.g. by Debian et al), so the users will be limited to
those willing to build the two pieces from scratch locally, i.e. similar
to ZFS on Linux (which I think is still the state of that ...).

But I'm not a lawyer and all that.

Another possibility is to get the library to dual-license itself,
running "git shortlog -sn" on it it seems it's mainly written by one
contributor, with a relatively short tail of others, perhaps they'd be
willing to dual-license at the prospect of having git use it?