Open Sourcing with (Imperfect) Revision History?

AArnott asks: "My company is open-sourcing a private project that has been in development for 4 years. It's history is all in our internal Subversion server. The history of the project includes dependencies on source code that we are not open-sourcing. Should we just publish the latest version (now that we've removed the dependencies) and leave out the old history? Or should we publish the history, even though no previous revision will build, due to the dependencies that we are not including?"

Re:Publish the history

[Ithika]

if he releases it under GPL there will be issues with his open sourcing the project but not all of the dependencies as required by the GPL.

But he's not omitting to release all of the dependencies --- the OP explicitly says that there are no (external) dependencies. There were, in the past, but not any longer. It's the current version that is being released under GPL, not something that it grew out of four years ago.

The previous version was under a different licence (or maybe none at all, if it never left the company), but licence changes don't act retrospectively.

Releasing the entire history (including the bits that cannot be compiled any longer) is the only right thing to do. Repositories maintain all sorts of useful metadata which should not be discarded just because the revisions they refer to no longer compile.