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.
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.
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?
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.