Well, there's lots of really interesting opinions here from a lot of armchair lawyers.
To clarify, my stance on this is that the reimplementation did not copy protected expressions (Jplag reports less than 1.8% max similarity between the codebases), it's done in good faith, and it's what's best for the broader Git ecosystem (assuming Grit even becomes usable, which it's currently not purported to be).
From a copyright standpoint, however, only the first argument there is relevant. Grit is an independently authored implementation of Git-compatible behavior, with negligible similarity to Git source code.
I think antirez summarized the situation quite well and I broadly agree with his position: https://antirez.com/news/162
I think that those in the community who know me and have worked with me in the Git and open source communities for the last 20 years know that my intentions are to contribute, share and foster innovation and learning. Many of the main authors of the Git source code are friends of mine and I have no intention to steal anything from anyone, only to make their great ideas more broadly useful.
Have you addressed anywhere why you chose not to keep the copyleft license? It burns a lot of goodwill to use an AI for what many people will see as copyright laundering, and git has done just fine with the GPL, so it doesn’t seem like a blocker for adoption. What do you get from stripping the copyleft?
Hey AI, please change my stolen code in a non-breaking way so that jplag reports less than 1,8% similarity.
I mean ”hey artist, take this stolen character and make them legally distinct” is already a common thing.
there are event exact measurements to take into account, for visual art, music etc. 'what is legally not stealing'.
Art, however, is a little different than code. code is a thing, but it also produces things.
It weirds me out there is a measure of code similarity but not a measure of if code is semantically the same. for example implementing a protocol could be done in many ways, but ultimately whats talked between clients/servers on the network is the same. so it's semantically the same despite being totally different code.
My question here is not whether it's legally permissible. I'll leave that to others.
It's WTF is wrong with this next generation of devs ? ... that they have such a problem with the GPL that they think it's important to rewrite and relicense and take away a legal structure which is supposed to protect our free software?
I can imagine some concerns with Git being written in C.
I cannot understand any legitimate concerns with its license that it needs to change.
What does the GPL stop people doing with git? And if there are some... why are people trying to do that? And why would you work for free to help people do it? [Edit: I see, you're not working for free.]
Missing an 'f' in the project name.