It depends on what from diffutils you need - for diff itself, OpenBSD seems to have a BSD licensed version. (/src/usr.bin/diff/) Seems to have diif3 and patch too. Diff3 seems to be the old attribution BSD license though.

Surely, the diff utils from BSD must be available under a BSD license, which would basically solve your problems with the GNU diffutils.

As for the Subversion license, the clause 3 makes it, unfortunately, GPL-incompatible.

The Subversion license is effectively identical to version 1.1 of the Apache license (http://apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-1.1), which the FSF state is incompatible with the GPL.

(Interestingly, the FSF believe that version 2.0 of the Apache license is compatible with GPL3, but not GPL2, while ASF disagree, and state that they think it's also compatible with GPL2 -- see http://www.apache.org/licenses/GPL-compatibility.html. I've no idea whether this confusion applies only to the version 2.0 Apache license, or whether the same applies to the version 1.1 license as well).

Just to chime in, I am fairly confident that glandium is right, the Subversion License contains the same sort of attribution clause that made the original BSD license incompatible with the GPL (and other licenses which state that further restrictions cannot be added).

See http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/bsd.html for more info

Worth approaching Tigris and asking them to consider a change in their license, making sure to mention if you work for Mozilla and what you want to do, it worked for the original BSD license.

I would recommend that they contact the FSF to get their view on the different clauses - I'm not 100% sure about the compatibility of clauses 4 or 5. The options would be (1) remove the requirements clauses [thus turning it into a BSD-like license] or (2) [may require copyright assignment or other legal option to update the license] If it's based on the Apache 1.1 license, they could update it to be based on the Apache 2.0 license instead, and you could then license your work under GPL3+ (and could use the GNU diffutils).