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What a FUD! SubVersion has never been licensed under the GPL license. It was developed by CollabNet and distributed under a fairly liberal license. Later it got transferred to the Apache Software Foundation which distributes software under the Apache License which is also NOT comparable to GPL. Even then the GPL does not cover the license of code maintained with a GPL licensed tool, but only code you would link in any way with that tool. And in the case of the Linux kernel there is even an explicit exception that applications running on Linux and therefore technically linking to the kernel in some way (they need to do kernel system calls for just about everything that interacts with the system) do not fall under the GPL unless the application developer elects to use the GPL for his software. As to VIPM it is under a commercial license from JKI. The OpenG libraries that are also used inside VIPM as well as being installed through VIPM are all under a BSD license, except the shared library parts that I wrote, which I left under LGPL. Technically this has no influence on any application developed with such OpenG libraries. The VI parts are BSD licensed and allow you to do almost anything with it except claiming you wrote them yourself and they require you to somewhere put a copyright notice that your application uses libraries from OpenG. The LGPL licensed shared libraries in those tools don't taint your application either since they are dynamically linked as a library and since LGPL explicitly exempts any software that uses such a library in such a way from any obligation to be open sourced itself, you are fully safe there. The main limitation the LGPL license has on those libraries is that you can't grab the C source code for them and create your own shared library from it and not open source it under the LGPL (or GPL) yourself. I feel this is a fair limitation. If someone takes that code and improves it in any way I want a chance that this improvement is returned to the community. If you use Tortoise SVN then yes that is distributed under the GPL but even then claiming that since your source files pass through Tortoise SVN somehow they are suddenly also GPL licensed is a total bullshit. It's analogous to claiming that any car driving through your private road automatically is owned by you from that point on. You may forbid other cars to drive on that road and get a ruling from a judge that anyone still driving there without your consent can get a fine but you don't automatically own them. Actually I think it is even more analogous to anyone driving on the public road in front of your house being suddenly liable to you for the mere fact of driving there!

I am not a lawyer and neither is anyone you are likely to get to respond here. If your company has a legal team, I'm pretty sure they would prefer you ask them rather than the internet. With that said... On the first statement, this sounds very clearly insane. More importantly, I would assume that if it *were* correct, you posting the question here would provide a record showing that you and your company violated the license and so posting here (if the entire idea wasn't crazy) would open you up to lawsuits. On the second (VIPM package which is GPL), as I understand it this means you must make your code open source. Take a look at https://choosealicense.com/ for the alternatives. An important distinction is between the GPL and LGPL.

I'm no lawyer, but from the first link: section 0 - 2nd paragraph: "Activities other than copying, distribution and modification are not covered by this License; they are outside its scope." So are you copying, distributing, or modifying SVN? I think likely not. And also the last part of section 2. "In addition, mere aggregation of another work not based on the Program with the Program (or with a work based on the Program) on a volume of a storage or distribution medium does not bring the other work under the scope of this License." My guess is that IT just wants you to use TSF because it is their standard program that they understand and it's less work for them. This is just a copout for them to justify it.