>Josh, you seem to be a BitKeeper apologist. If you don't like that >label, please explain to us why you're not because we want to give you >the benefit of the doubt.
i'm not sure what i said to make me seem like a bitkeeper apologist. (???) but for the record, i'm not..er, i don't think i am... (i'm not sure what a bitkeep apologist is exactly..) ;-) >The take-home lesson here is that a proprietary license for >a beer-free product can not be trusted like an open source license can. while i don't think it's the take-home lesson, i can't disagree with your statement - but i do stand by my previous comments on the subject, which i think are orthogonal to that particular view. er, well, mostly i just wanted to get to use the word 'orthogonal' in a sentence. Josh Coates www.jcoates.org -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of Hans Fugal Sent: Wednesday, April 06, 2005 5:45 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: Slashdot feed... Josh, you seem to be a BitKeeper apologist. If you don't like that label, please explain to us why you're not because we want to give you the benefit of the doubt. "Larry explained that a contracter still under pay from OSDL for an unrelated project was also actively working on reverse engineering the BitKeeper protocol. Discussion began about five weeks ago to try and resolve the situation, getting so far as to obtain a verbal agreement that the individual would stop his efforts. After that time, however, it turned out that the reverse engineering effort had continued. Although OSDL wasn't directly paying for the reverse engineering effort, they were still employing someone who was actively developing a competing product, something the free BitKeeper license doesn't allow."[1] If this _contractor_ agreed to stop, then it was a lame thing for him to continue. I don't know what "reverse engineering" means here, but _if_ it means he was using bk and developing something else then he was going against the bk license. But I don't know enough about what he was doing. What I do know (from what I have read) is that OSDL didn't pay this guy to reverse engineer it. The only thing OSDL could do is fire him, not based on his performance but based on what he develops in his spare time. How would you, as an employer, like to be in that pickle? What would you choose? Now for my own opinions. I've read more than a few posts about bk and by Larry in lkml archives, and my own opinion is that the divorce from bk and Mr. McVoy is a good thing no matter how it comes about. I think it will be a GREAT thing for whichever not-quite-ready SCM gets picked to take its place. I just hope the project leads can absorb the flurry of activity without forcing a fork, since that's never fun. I think what has happened here is very simple: Larry needed the prestige and Linus needed something like bk. Larry doesn't need the prestige any more, and this OSDL employee thing is a good excuse to cut loose. Does that make Larry a bad guy? Not necessarily. He's just following the greenbacks. The take-home lesson here is that a proprietary license for a beer-free product can not be trusted like an open source license can. With open source there is no forced EOL of a product, only a change of maintainership. If bk were open source, bk would be being forked now. Would we have been better off if Linus didn't use bk at all? I can't say. I really don't know. Life is funny that way - even in hindsight it's hard to know if the decision was really right or wrong. 1. http://kerneltrap.org/node/4966 -- .O. Hans Fugal | De gustibus non disputandum est. ..O http://hans.fugal.net | Debian, vim, mutt, ruby, text, gpg OOO | WindowMaker, gaim, UTF-8, RISC, JS Bach --------------------------------------------------------------------- GnuPG Fingerprint: 6940 87C5 6610 567F 1E95 CB5E FC98 E8CD E0AA D460 .===================================. | This has been a P.L.U.G. mailing. | | Don't Fear the Penguin. | | IRC: #utah at irc.freenode.net | `==================================='
