Slashdot Mirror

how bitkeeper fucked up and was swiftly relegated to irrelevance... you have to wonder how many of these are even still using bk......

Thank you, editors. That makes the first time I've seen you pull a dupe...ever. For those curious about this unprecedented event, it was a dupe of the "why vista had to be rebuilt from scratch" story from a few days ago which linked to here; it made things sound as if this was current, breaking news (instead of being a year in the past).

Back ONtopic, these concerns about kernel maintainers burning out harken back to the BitKeeper uproar. IMHO, it would make health, job, and life easier if Linus et al found a better way to streamline the kernel dev process. We would all benefit.

I recently discovered this, ErgoPod 500, which looks pretty awesome to me.

Along with The Perfect Chair.

Or maybe even, the Stance Angle Chair.

Not having any better idea, I'd probably go for an Alienware Area-51 ALX with NVIDIA SLI.

And given my background, I'd be focusing on revision control software - maybe BitKeeper, and backup of same.

And then of course use a unit testing framework from day one, and buy some books about coding - ranging from PeopleWare to Death March, from Effective C++ and Effective STL to The Dilbert Principle, from Design Patterns and Refactoring to Best Software I...

Oh, and UPS the whole damn thing.

Isn't it also possible that Microsoft hope that a 3rd party will do a BitMover style closed source SMB implementation for Linux.

Such a product could, potentially, provide better compatibility with Windows, by leveraging access to MS specifications. And it would legally have to remain proprietary closed source.

This would effectively drive a wedge between "Free Software" and "Open Source".

And ultimately if this 3rd party ever outlived its usefulness Microsoft could snuff it out like all those previous proprietary competitors.

What FUD...Everyone offers support services for software. Event BitKeeper does. As for RedHat not creating, it's sole business model is the support service field. Moving from business model to business model is not a model for staying in business.

But there's already an open-source tool for pulling code out of BitKeeper. So what is the point in Tridge's release?

Isn't this exactly what Linus has just done?

No. Git isn't an SCM, it's just a file system for which an SCM can sit over.

Nah, that's just smart wording. Linus is using Git by itself now, not "under an SCM". And what it he using it for? To manage source code! Isn't that what SCM (Source Code Management) tools are for?

But of course, Larry McVoy won't sue. Linus' public endorsement of BitKeeper is a precious asset -- how many people would even know of BitMover if it wasn't for Linus? It's a shame that apparently the license does not apply fairly to everyone, though.

So, in conclusion, big frickin' deal. BK got a few years of valuable, free beta testing, Linus got some work done, and the Open source folks got a reminder as to why the Free source folks got religon.

Following up as AC so as not to Karma whore:
Welcome to BitMover! We build and market enterprise level development tools for software, hardware, and web developers. Our flagship product is BitKeeper, a reliable, powerful, and distributed configuration management system. BitKeeper is supported on most platforms, such as Microsoft Windows, Linux, Unix, and MacOS/X.

Users that don't pay for the product, and thus, don't help support the development of that product. In my opinion, that means BitKeeper doesn't owe those users anything. I wouldn't owe you a free lunch tomorrow, just because I supplied you with a free lunch today.

The Bitkeeper website mentions Linux kernel development prominently and quotes Linus on their front page. Any charity involved in helping kernel development has been more than made up for by the free advertising Bitkeep has recieved.

How many people would even know about this tool if it hadn't been used in Linux kernel development? Advertising is a form of payment.

Haven't you heard?

No, that's not what it says. It is much broader. The licence (no longer shown on their web site) says

Notwithstanding any other terms in this License, this License is not available to You if You and/or your employer develop, produce, sell, and/or resell a product which contains substantially similar capabilities of the BitKeeper Software, or, in the reasonable opinion of BitMover, competes with the BitKeeper Software.

Around 20 years ago a programmer at MIT quit his job to develop a complete and free Unix-style operating system--the GNU system. That programmer was Richard Stallman, also known as rms, the founder of the Free Software Foundation.

Since 1984 he has fought for software freedom and created the concept of free software. Software is considered free if users have the following four freedoms:

• The freedom to run the program, for any purpose (freedom 0).
• The freedom to study how the program works and adapt it to your needs (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition.
• The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor (freedom 2).
• The freedom to improve the program and release your improvements to the public, so that the whole community benefits (freedom 3). Access to the source code is a precondition.

Copyleft licenses protect these four freedoms. The most prominent license is the GNU General Public License, which allows the author to retain a copyright and permits redistribution and modification under terms designed to ensure that all modified versions of the software remain under copyleft terms.

In this period of threats to freedom, Federico Biancuzzi interviewed this freedom paladin.

FB: GNU/Linux (the complete OS!) is probably the most known free software project. What do you think about the fact that Linux (the kernel!) uses a proprietary program to manage its source code?

RMS: It is unfortunate when anyone uses proprietary software. Using it publicly for the development of a prominent free software package is particularly unfortunate, because it sets a bad example for the community.

FB: Isn't there any free alternative under development?

RMS: There are already free programs that do the same basic job. Linus Torvalds feels they are not convenient enough, and he values convenience more than he values standing firm for freedom. I think that is leading the community in the wrong direction.

As part of the GNU Project, Tom Lord is developing a new free source control system called Arch, which we hope will outdo the proprietary ones.

But just because we are competing with proprietary software on issues of technical merit doesn't mean we think people should choose the program for source control based on technical qualities alone. That would mean assigning zero value to freedom itself. If you value freedom, you will resist the temptation to use a program that takes away your freedom, whatever technical advantages it may have.

FB: What do you think about proprietary software? Does it have low quality? Is it unsecure? Does it restrict freedom too much? Is it unethical?

RMS: Proprietary software is unethical, because it denies the user the basic freedom to control her own computer and to cooperate. It may also be of low quality or insecure, but that's a secondary issue. I will reject it even if it is the best quality in the world, simply because I value my freedom too much to give it up for that.

FB: Would you accept a federal law in the United States to enforce the distribution of source code with every type of software?

RMS: I am not calling for such a law as of now, but I think that would be a valid consumer protection measure--like requiring food products to publish the list of ingredients.

Of course, some software companies would object to this, j

Bitkeeper/Linux

It's a kernel that doesn't even have proper source control

Most developers (including Linus) use BitKeeper but that's another flamewar ;)

Others (who don't want/need BK) use CVS or just send patches to the mailing list where they're disseminated. If the patch is good it may get merged into someone's tree.

I have nothing against FreeBSD. You like it: more power to you. I hope that you actually know the code somewhat rather than just relay messages regarding code management that somehow makes everything great. Revision control is a tool, not a panacea.

Cheers
Stor

Don't tell me, tell these guys:
Bitkeeper
Perforce
Clearcase
(Look at the titles)

Probably want to send and email over to the guys on comp.software.config-mgmt, I'm sure they are going to want to hear they've been using the wrong acronym all this time.

It also depends on what he is coding in, and what tools he is using. The thing that drives me up the wall with CVS is that it's hard to do moves and renames, both of which are crucial to refactoring-friendly languages like Java. Also the lack of atomic commits can be truely infuriating. Same with lack of change sets. You shouldn't pick a SCCS (source code control system) without understanding why all these things are good.

However CVS does have whole lot more tools available for it than SVN does. However, since he's just supporting himself, why not go out and buy a BitKeeper license. Sure it's a couple hundred dollars but it's included GUI tools are worth it. It's got a windows client and you can try before you buy. With a large code base like this guy has, it's really worth,

In conclusion, there are two main SCCS philosophies now, those who want to replace CVS, like SVN, and those who want to improve upon SCCS in general, a la BitKeeper.

If your statement is really true, isn't that quite a bit constraining to linux kernel development? This should not be a anti-BK-rant (I never used BK and can't say anything about it's qualities), but I think this would be a good argument against it. In the M$/SCO world, one expects such NDAs. But not in the Linux world.

This is exactly my concern. There is even this question: Do you anticipate implementing a source management system in the next: [Please select] on BitKeeper's download form, where providing your real name and email address is mandatory.

Let me quote Bitkeeper issue from Linux, GNU, and freedom by Richard M. Stallman:

[...]

Bitkeeper issue

The use of Bitkeeper for the Linux sources has a grave effect on the free software community, because anyone who wants to closely track patches to Linux can only do it by installing that non-free program. There must be dozens or even hundreds of kernel hackers who have done this. Most of them are gradually convincing themselves that it is ok to use non-free software, in order to avoid a sense of cognitive dissonance about the presence of Bitkeeper on their machines. What can be done about this?

One solution is to set up another repository for the Linux sources, using CVS or another free version control system, and arranging to load new versions into it automatically. This could use Bitkeeper to access the latest revisions, then install the new revisions into CVS. That update process could run automatically and frequently.

The FSF cannot do this, because we cannot install Bitkeeper on our machines. We have no non-free systems or applications on them now, and our principles say we must keep it that way. Operating this repository would have to be done by someone else who is willing to have Bitkeeper on his machine, unless someone can find or make a way to do it using free software.

The Linux sources themselves have an even more serious problem with non-free software: they actually contain some. Quite a few device drivers contain series of numbers that represent firmware programs to be installed in the device. These programs are not free software. A few numbers to be deposited into device registers are one thing; a substantial program in binary is another.

The presence of these binary-only programs in ``source'' files of Linux creates a secondary problem: it calls into question whether Linux binaries can legally be redistributed at all. The GPL requires ``complete corresponding source code,'' and a sequence of integers is not the source code. By the same token, adding such a binary to the Linux sources violates the GPL.

The Linux developers have a plan to move these firmware programs into separate files; it will take a few years to mature, but when completed it will solve the secondary problem; we could make a ``free Linux'' version that doesn't have the non-free firmware files. That by itself won't do much good if most people use the non-free ``official'' version of Linux. That may well occur, because on many platforms the free version won't run without the non-free firmware. The ``free Linux'' project will have to figure out what the firmware does and write source code for it, perhaps in assembler language for whatever embedded processor it runs on. It's a daunting job. It would be less daunting if we had done it little by little over the years, rather than letting it mount up. In recruiting people to do this job, we will have to overcome the idea, spread by some Linux developers, that the job is not necessary.

Linux, the kernel, is often thought of as the flagship of free software, yet its current version is partially non-free. How did this happen? This problem, like the decision to use Bitkeeper, re

If nothing else this whole SCO fiasco shows that Linux needs a disciplined approach to keeping track of where things are coming from in order to avoid future problems.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I am quite sure the Linux kernel developers keep good track of who commits what. They use a revision control system called BitKeeper. I haven't used it myself, but from what I hear, it is a great tool for keeping track of changes (and who contributed them). The kernel developers certainly seem to have a good grasp of who contributes a specific patch--from what I've seen anyway.

SCO was being deliberatly vague about what was in dispute. They said it was because they wanted to keep "trade secrets", but one has to wonder if they knew their claims were crap--especially considering how absurd they were. No amount of contribution tracking will be able to defend against parasite con-artists who just want to fleece a bunch of victims. They will say anything they can think of to obscure the truth so their "case" may have some sort of chance in court, and unfortunately the US court system doesn't seem to pay much attention to the truth these days.

If you want to develop and distribute closed source apps, why don't you do it on Windows?

Because I'm no great fan of Windows - I like the unix development environment too much.

In case you didn't notice, the Linux culture values freedom.

Er. Who do you mean by "the Linux culture", and what do you mean by "freedom"? Do you mean the freedom to use closed-source software in kernel development?

Have you looked at bitkeeper? It is a fantastic source-control system, and has a reasonable OSS-project free-use license.

Apparently you don't understand the implications of the BK license. Nowhere in the free license (http://www.bitkeeper.com/bkl.txt) is there any limitation on what Linus or any other BK user can do in the future. It simply says that they can't use BK to write a BK competitor or clone. (Section 3(c) - and note that limitation is one of the FREE BK license, the commercial BK license is a whole different animal and doesn't apply to this situation at all.)

From this page:

* CVS is in widespread use, mainly because it is free. It works fairly well for simple tasks, it's better than just using RCS. It has problems as the development effort gets large.

* CVS has a single repository model. Each work area is clear text only which means no revision control in the work area during development.
* BitKeeper provides staging areas. You can mimic CVS by having one master repository and several work areas. You can also extend that to have one master and several staging areas with several work areas below each staging area. This allows people working on related projects to merge amongst themselves before merging into the master. Anyone who has lived through a change that broke the build can see the value of staging areas.
* Merging in CVS is primitive at best.
* Branch management in CVS is a nightmare.
* CVS has no change sets, i.e., no atomic commits of changes which span files.
* CVS has no rename support.
* CVS was based on RCS and still has RCS' limitations.
* On the plus side, CVS is free, works well enough for some development projects, and CVS repositories are easily converted to BitKeeper. If you can't afford a good source management product, use CVS, we'll help you migrate off of it when the time comes.

Everyone I've talked to who's ever touched it agrees that branching and merging in CVS is really, really ugly, and I know people who say CVS sucks horribly just because of those limitations. (Well, that and renaming.) OTOH, if your project isn't massively large and horribly complex, CVS is great, and I've had no bad experiences with it personally. Unfortunately, kernel development is massively large (and distributed) and horribly complex ^^;

Notice Subversion isn't mentioned on der Fuhrer's, Heinrich Larry McVoy, web site. That?s because its better. And its doesn?t have the lynch mob license.

Everyone, do a Google search on the badmouthing ranting brat, McVoy, here.

You will see he is a ranting brat, who can't really make money doing innovative things, so he copies essentially what Teamware does, and introduces this fucking bullshit license. Look, BSD, Apache, GPL and some slight variations of the said licenses. No, Reichsfuhrer McVoy (Waffen SS) needs to have a EULA that would make lawyers at MSFT personally worship him.

You can see him, prancing and posing on his web page, showing his affiliations with the geeks, and talking of his nice cats, and I love cats, I feel bad they have to be owned by McVoy. I suspect if he is like he is with the cats as he is with licenses, he beats them, then soft talks, pets them, feeds them, gives them milk, then beats them.

He is a minion of darkness, and anti-open-source zealot, a wolf in sheep's clothes, seeking to undermine, erode and destroy the only reason Linux, which is a piece of shit compared to more coherent, beautiful, consistently documentation of which there are too many to name, is the really interesting license that keeps improvements to GNU/Linux source code PUBLIC.

Larry sits upon his lofty perch, his sagely experience career and his all knowingness. He flames and deprecates Linux, with some deserved points, then he offers gratuitous sex to a certain few and gets his BitDungeonKeeper used on the Linux tree, and now it lies, polluted and tainted in an unfree cage dying.

There should be a new troll on Slashdot now, FACT: Free Linux is Dying. [There is no article from Netcraft anymore since people like Larry and others can tell people what the fuck they can and cant do with their software based on whatever other software they are using].

Here I have a list of reprehensions against Larry McVoy. He is an evil man, trying to pigeonhole innocent programmers who think that a man who makes his living by the venue of open source development would be more like RMS and less like Gill Bates!!

There is currently a lot of controversy about Mr. Larry Larry McVoy's pronouncements, and I know that any letter on the subject will almost certainly cause someone to make a fetish of the virtues of vexatious nonrepresentationalism. Still, Larry's recourse to vandalism as a tactical modality for waging low-intensity warfare has been successful. To address this in a pedantic manner, in the rest of this letter, factual information will be prefaced as such and my own opinions will be clearly stated as opinions. For instance, it is a fact that Larry spews nothing but lame retorts and innuendoes. Am I aware of how Larry will react when he reads that last sentence? Yes. Do I care? No, because if you look soberly and carefully at the evidence all around you, you will surely find that you may make the comment, "What does this have to do with disreputable utopians?" Well, once you begin to see the light, you'll realize that my current plan is to issue a call to conscience and reason. Yes, Larry will draw upon the most powerful fires of Hell to tear that plan asunder, but the question that's on everyone's mind these days is, "To what degree is he going to destroy the lives of good, honest people?" Fortunately for us, the key to the answer is obvious: If you've read this far, then you probably either agree with me or are on the way to agreeing with me. True, the ideological underpinnings of Larry's modes of thought have struck a receptive chord among thousands of disruptive dummkopfs, but given the amount of misinformation that Larry is circulating, I must point out that if we don't soon tell him to stop what he's doing, he will proceed with his mis

I use it and I'm very happy with it. Heck, even Linux kernel is maintained with it.

They say they are using a new source code control system with "acquired technology" , apparently because the previous version (which I'm assuming is SourceSafe) wasn't up to the task. I'd like more details please ... we are considering ditching a very old version of PVCS where I work. Bitkeeper won't do it, and CVS + Bugzilla isn't a solution.

Now if Red Hat shipped TrueChange, Perforce, or (more relevant in this case) Subversion, then it would be a different matter.

Thank you for the list of better alternatives to the piece of totalitarian crap known as BitKeeper. Larry has used people, contacts and has used chicanery to dupe the open source community into aprecating the ways of Bill Gates and others. I find his snarky, snotty curt replies and completely ambiguous license (which apparently is a "living document" [a term which is a load of non committal crap aptly describing what the BK license is] and can be changed to meet Larry's mood if he so wills it). I read those links above, and find his to be an embarrassment, and would advise that he hire some blond tart to interface with the "geek" public; she even in her tartdom, would probably piss me off less than this guy. RMS may be a weirdo, but its guys like this who twist and mangle a concept the profit by that makes that guy look like a saint. A least RMS is consistent. This Larry character is a sophist, and that would be a compliment at best.

If green haired people killed him for doing that I wouldn't blame them - but seriously:

So, then, is it okay to have a EULA:
"Jews, Niggers and W.O.P's can't use this software, dang knabbit!"

Sounds ridiculous. I'm sure Microsoft would like to say; Sun Corporation employees may never use Microsoft Windows.

But they can't, not that they won't, there are probably a billion laws in place that protect the consumer. The EULA is a pile of shit, and rarely stands up in court. Copyright stands up just fine [can't pirate, reverse engineer, blah blah], but everyone knows the EULA is a crock of shit.

About a typical EULA, is says this product's license may not be resold or transferred to another person, which would arguably make the software worthless (a valid suggestion). How can Software copyright holders contradict the value of their own software in a EULA by suggesting its worthless? They really cant.

The EULA is a piece of crap, in general, its a bullshit pile of legalese crap and cruft, and no one ever reads them, and when they do, they find all sorts of stupid, irrelevant and contradictory crap. And the states and the federal government, particularly a jury of peers, is likely to override bullshit EULA contracts in favor of laws protecting consumers.

This whole thread is really stupid. McVoy has to know the EULA means shit. He copyrights his works and makes it clear you cant steal it, but you can use it if you don't make money off of it. Kind of classic. The crock is that the guy has exceptions, and all sorts of crap going on and excuses for the Linux kernel and just lame, random precedentless behavior.

This who subsection of law and debate is crap. There is a simple axiom to all this: If you use the software to make money and its not free (like real free, not McVoy free, free like beer, you drink it and piss it out) buy the stuff. The software vendor should set a price (preferably in the affordable range, don't you software pricks scratch your head why shit gets warezed when its 1000-2000% overpriced with NO support and no integration services), and that's the end of it.

I looked at bitcrapper. It's a reasonable product, works, reminiscent of Teamware. Its distribution method is lame, its password to download is stupid, its asking for an email address on download is fucked up, it's an all round pain in the ass. Just use Subversion and avoid retard McVoy. Its okay for him to leverage the kernel for free advertising but he has to waltz around and threaten people and fuck with a ridiculous canned (probably abstracted from one of those EULA's you get at Office Depot) EULA and get into flame wars clarifying ridiculous waste of time shit.

Maybe if retards like this who worked at Sun a while back had actually pulled their weight SUNW wouldn't be $2.50 a share - im sure this dolt was at the water cooler whining about everything and stealing TeamWare source code to re implement later as BitBuchenwald and harass the Open Source types with de Raadt-esqe whining and ranting over things that are so, "been there, done that."

Notice Subversion isn't mentioned on der Fuhrer's, Heinrich Larry McVoy, web site. That's because its better. And its doesn't have the lynch mob license. [bitkeeper.com]

Everyone, do a Google search on the badmouthing ranting brat, McVoy, here. [google.com]

You will see he is a ranting brat, who can't really make money doing innovative things, so he copies essentially what Teamware does, and introduces this fucking bullshit license. Look, BSD, Apache, GPL and some slight variations of the said licenses. No, Reichsfuhrer McVoy (Waffen SS) needs to have a EULA that would make lawyers at MSFT personally worship him.

You can see him, prancing and posing on his web page, showing his affiliations with the geeks, and talking of his nice cats, and I love cats, I feel bad they have to be owned by McVoy. I suspect if he is like he is with the cats as he is with licenses, he beats them, then soft talks, pets them, feeds them, gives them milk, then beats them.

He is a minion of darkness, and anti-open-source zealot, a wolf in sheep's clothes, seeking to undermine, erode and destroy the only reason Linux, which is a piece of shit compared to more coherent, beautiful, consistently documentation of which there are too many to name, is the really interesting license that keeps improvements to GNU/Linux source code PUBLIC.

Larry sits upon his lofty perch, his sagely experience career and his all knowingness. He flames and deprecates Linux, with some deserved points, then he offers gratuitous sex to a certain few and gets his BitDungeonKeeper used on the Linux tree, and now it lies, polluted and tainted in an unfree cage dying.

There should be a new troll on Slashdot now, FACT: Free Linux is Dying. [There is no article from Netcraft anymore since people like Larry and others can tell people what the fuck they can and cant do with their software based on whatever other software they are using].

Here I have a list of reprehensions against Larry McVoy. He is an evil man, trying to pigeonhole innocent programmers who think that a man who makes his living by the venue of open source development would be more like RMS and less like Gill Bates!!

There is currently a lot of controversy about Mr. Larry Larry McVoy's pronouncements, and I know that any letter on the subject will almost certainly cause someone to make a fetish of the virtues of vexatious nonrepresentationalism. Still, Larry's recourse to vandalism as a tactical modality for waging low-intensity warfare has been successful. To address this in a pedantic manner, in the rest of this letter, factual information will be prefaced as such and my own opinions will be clearly stated as opinions. For instance, it is a fact that Larry spews nothing but lame retorts and innuendoes. Am I aware of how Larry will react when he reads that last sentence? Yes. Do I care? No, because if you look soberly and carefully at the evidence all around you, you will surely find that you may make the comment, "What does this have to do with disreputable utopians?" Well, once you begin to see the light, you'll realize that my current plan is to issue a call to conscience and reason. Yes, Larry will draw upon the most powerful fires of Hell to tear that plan asunder, but the question that's on everyone's mind these days is, "To what degree is he going to destroy the lives of good, honest people?" Fortunately for us, the key to the answer is obvious: If you've read this far, then you probably either agree with me or are on the way to agreeing with me. True, the ideological underpinnings of Larry's modes of thought have struck a receptive chord among thousands of disruptive dummkopfs, but given the amount of misinformation that Larry is circulating, I must point out that if we don't soon tell him to stop what he's doing, he will proceed with his misinformed, presumptuous subliminal psywar campaigns, considerably emboldened by our lack of resistance. We will have tacitly given him our permission to do so.

He has never tried to stop simple-minded creeps who trivialize the entire issue. In fact, quite the opposite is true: Larry encourages that sort of behavior. Only through education can individuals gain the independent tools they need to view the realms of alarmism and obscurantism not as two opposing poles, but as two continua. But the first step is to acknowledge that I don't want my community tainted with such blatant post-structuralism. To cap that off, I don't want to build castles in the air. I don't want to plan things that I can't yet implement. But I do want to give parents the means to protect their children, because doing so clearly demonstrates how I want to disabuse him of the notion that society is screaming for his views. I want to do this not because I need to tack another line onto my résumé, but because he spouts the same bile in everything he writes, making only slight modifications to suit the issue at hand. The issue he's excited about this week is priggism, which says to me that there is no such thing as evil in the abstract. It exists only in the evil deeds of evil people like Larry. Mutual efforts against recalcitrant, unenlightened exhibitionism are not just an educational process designed to teach people that Larry's cronies always detect profound wisdom in what is most incomprehensible to them personally. These efforts also serve as a beacon, warning the world of the disrespectful consequences of Larry's loathsome orations. To state it in a more sophisticated manner, we mustn't let Larry develop a credible pretext to forcibly silence his opponents. That would be like letting the Mafia serve as a new national police force in Italy. Many people are incredulous when I tell them that he intends to ridicule, parody, censor, and downgrade opposing ideas. "How could Larry be so perverted?", they ask me. "It doesn't seem possible." Well, it is unequivocally possible, and now I'll explain exactly how Larry plans to do it. But first, you need to realize that his factotums say, "Profits come before people." Yes, I'm afraid they really do talk like that. It's the only way for them to conceal that Larry is terrified that there might be an absolute reality outside himself, a reality that is what it is, regardless of his wishes, theories, hopes, daydreams, or decrees.

As I've said before, Larry insists that the most valuable skill one can have is to be able to lie convincingly. Sorry, Larry, but, with apologies to Gershwin, "it ain't necessarily so." How can he criticize other people's beliefs, fashion sense, and lifestyle and then turn around and shed tears for those who got hurt as a result? People often ask me that question. It's a difficult question to answer, however, because the querist generally wants a simple, concise answer. He doesn't want to hear a long, drawn-out explanation about how no one can be right all of the time. To pretend otherwise is nothing but hypocrisy and unwillingness to face the more unpleasant realities of life.

Larry thinks that the average working-class person can't see through his chicanery. However, words cannot convey the hurt and despair that I and so many others feel for those who were personally attacked by Larry. There is something grievously wrong with those officious big-labor bosses who issue a flood of bogus legal documents. Shame on the lot of them! Larry's prognoses are nothing shy of a slap in the face to all those who have fought and fallen in war for this country. For proof of this fact, I must point out that everything I've said so far is by way of introduction to the key point I want to make in this letter. My key point is that if Larry were paying attention -- which it would seem he is not, as I've already gone over this -- he'd see that I correctly predicted that he would create catchy, new terms for boring, old issues. Alas, I didn't think he'd do that so effectively -- or so soon. Larry's stories about voyeurism are particularly ridden with errors and distortions, even leaving aside the concept's initial implausibility.

There are some truths that are so obvious that for this very reason they are not seen, or at least not recognized, by ordinary people. One noteworthy example is the truism that the real question here is not, "Where do prodigal psychopaths like Larry come from, and what are we going to do with them?". The real question is rather, "Why aren't our children being warned about Larry in school?" Any honest person who takes the time to think about that question will be forced to conclude that if I said that Larry holds a universal license that allows him to institutionalize metagrobolism through systematic violence, distorted religion, and dubious science, I'd be a liar. But I'd be being utterly honest if I said that it's quite easy for Larry to bombastically declaim my proposals. But when is he going to provide an alternative proposal of his own? Before you answer, let me point out that he maintains that he is always being misrepresented and/or persecuted. This is hardly the case. Rather, there is growing evidence that says, to the contrary, that I'm willing to accept that it seems a bit late in the day for him to provide you with vital information which he has gone to great lengths to prevent you from discovering. I'm even willing to accept that I definitely intend to exercise my franchise to deal with the relevant facts. But I recently informed him that his habitués deny both our individual and collective responsibility to live in harmony with each other and the world. Larry said he'd "look further into the matter." Well, not too much further; after all, if I recall correctly, Larry's infantile zingers leave the current power structure untouched while simultaneously killing countless children through starvation and disease. Are these children his enemies? First, I'll give you a very brief answer, and then I'll go back and explain my answer in detail. As for the brief answer, his older stances were spineless enough. His latest ones are honestly beyond the pale. Larry and his satraps are, by nature, pathological, jejune swaggerers. Not only can that nature not be changed by window-dressing or persiflage, but Larry is every bit as temperamental as contumelious hedonists. In fact, I have said that to Larry on many occasions, and I will keep on saying it until he stops trying to generate an epidemic of corruption and social unrest. I have given this issue a great deal of thought, and I now have a strong conviction that he has commented that anyone who dares to give him a rhadamanthine warning not to reinforce the impression that useless lunatics -- as opposed to Larry's advocates -- are striving to resort to underhanded tactics can expect to suffer hair loss and tooth decay as a result. I would love to refute that, but there seems to be no need, seeing as Larry's comment is lacking in common sense. I should note that Larry wants to exploit the masses. You know what groups have historically wanted to do the same thing? Fascists and Nazis. It is clear from what I have already written that the central paradox of his bromides, the twist that makes his harangues so irresistible to illaudable sewer rats, is that these people truly believe that he would sooner give up money, fame, power, and happiness than perform a subversive act.

Curiously, some people think it's a bit extreme of me to do something good for others -- a bit over the top, perhaps. Well, what I ought to remind such people is that to believe that Larry has a "special" perspective on cannibalism which carries with it a "special" right to crush the will of all individuals who have expressed political and intellectual opposition to his canards is to deceive ourselves. He asserts that some people deserve to feel safe while others do not. That assertion is not only untrue, but a conscious lie. Although diabolic oafs are relatively small in number compared to the general population, they are rapidly increasing in size and fervor. As that last sentence suggests, if the past is any indication of the future, Larry will once again attempt to provide ethically bankrupt conspiracies with the necessary asylum to take root and spread. His drug-induced ravings are designed to do the devil's work. And they're working; they're having the desired effect.

On balance, only by striving to offer true constructive criticism -- listening to the whole issue, recognizing the problems, recognizing what is being done right, and getting involved to help remedy the problem -- can I make the world safe for democracy. Still, Larry has certainly never given evidence of thinking extensively. Or at all, for that matter. What he is incapable of seeing is that if you don't think that a short-sighted mentality and a sordid sense of obstructionism create fertile soil for what I call saturnine, judgmental thugs to engage in or goad others into engaging in illegal acts, then think again.

In my effort to uncover Larry's hidden prejudices, I will need to stand as a witness in the divine court of the eternal judge and proclaim that Larry frequently progresses into displays of authority he doesn't have. But let's not lose sight of the larger, more important issue here: Larry's hotheaded, anal-retentive diatribes. He wants nothing less than to gag free speech. His legates then wonder, "What's wrong with that?" Well, there's not much to be done with laughable bozos who can't figure out what's wrong with that, but the rest of us can plainly see that this makes me fearful that I might someday find myself in the crosshairs of Larry's prissy nostrums. (To be honest, though, it wouldn't be the first time.) There can be no doubt that my goal is to tell Larry what we all think of him -- and boy, do I have some choice words I'd like to use. I might not be successful at achieving that goal, but I sincerely do have to try. He is driving me nuts. I can't take it anymore!

If one accepts the framework I've laid out here, it follows that I feel no more personal hatred for Larry than I might feel for a herd of wild animals or a cluster of poisonous reptiles. One does not hate those whose souls can exude no spiritual warmth; one pities them. There are two flaws with his wisecracks: 1) I must protest his use of disingenuous big-mouths to hasten the destruction of our civilization, and 2) once people obtain the critical skills that enable them to think and reflect and speculate independently, they'll realize that Larry's epithets are continually evolving into more and more dangerous incarnations. Here, I'm not just talking about evolution in a simply Darwinist sense; I'm also talking about how in order to solve the big problems with Larry, we must first understand these problems, and to understand them, we must enable all people to achieve their potential as human beings. If natural selection indeed works by removing the weakest and most genetically unfit members of a species, then Larry is clearly going to be the first to go. Contrary to popular belief, his tricks cannot stand on their own merit. That's why they're dependent on elaborate artifices and explanatory stories to convince us that Larry's solutions are not worth getting outraged about. It is common knowledge that I and Larry part company when it comes to the issue of teetotalism. He feels that the best way to make a point is with foaming-at-the-mouth rhetoric and letters filled primarily with exclamation points, while I contend that as our society continues to unravel, more and more people will be grasping for straws, grasping for something to hold onto, grasping for something that promises to give them the sense of security and certainty that they so desperately need. These are the classes of people Larry preys upon.

Come on, Larry; I know you're capable of thoughtful social behavior. If I am correct that he has always promoted the trendiest causes, the causes that all of the important people promote, then in a tacit concession of defeat, Larry is now openly calling for the abridgment of various freedoms to accomplish coercively what his barbaric reinterpretations of historic events have failed at. Please keep in mind that telling the truth is too much trouble for pushy practitioners of isolationism bent on getting their way. Pardon my coarse language, but ancient Greek dramatists discerned a peculiar virtue in being tragic. Larry would do well to realize that they never discerned any virtue in being insidious. Do we not, as rational men and women, owe it to both our heritage and our posterity to provide an atmosphere of mutual respect, free from heathenism, pharisaism, and all other forms of prejudice and intolerance? I think we do. I close this letter along the same lines it opened on: Mr. Larry Larry McVoy's analects are unhealthy and lacking in purpose.

At times, we all have an axe to grind. Currently, I'm grinding my axe in regards to Mr. Larry Larry McVoy's remarks. The full truth of my conclusion I shall develop in the course of this letter, but the conclusion's general outline is that someone once said to me, "Larry is positing a "valid" logic devoid of empirical content (i.e., devoid of facts)." This phrase struck me so forcefully that I have often used it since. He has a natural talent for complaining. He can find any aspect of life and whine about it for hours upon hours.

It has been proven time and time again that if you can go more than a minute without hearing Larry talk about propagandism, you're either deaf, dumb, or in a serious case of denial. From the very beginning, ultra-sick popinjays have labored to recruit into their ranks the sons and daughters of the powerful, famous, and rich, as evidenced by the way that I've tried explaining to his goons that I am not particularly fond of him, but it is clear to me in talking to them that they have no comprehension of what I'm saying. I might as well be talking to creatures from Mars. Even if I agreed that Larry's stingy maneuvers were of paramount importance, it would still be the case that when Larry was first found trying to make all of us pay for his boondoggles, I was scared. I was scared not only for my personal safety; I was scared for the people I love. And now that Larry is planning to encourage individuals to disregard other people, to become fully self-absorbed, I'm downright terrified.

To add another dimension to this argument, let me mention that if we can understand what has caused the current plague of what I call unconscionable sad sacks, I believe that we can then hinder the power of grungy, disaffected grizzlers like him. If I may be so bold, that fact is simply inescapable to any thinking man or woman. "Thinking" is the key word in the previous sentence. Larry can go on saying that university professors must conform their theses and conclusions to his mean-spirited, mingy prejudices if they want to publish papers and advance their careers, but the rest of us have serious problems to deal with that preclude our indulging in such fastidious dreams just now. In spite of all he has done, I must admit I really like the guy. No, just kidding. His "I'm right and you're wrong" attitude is execrable, because it leaves no room for compromise. We must give peace a chance. As mentioned above, however, that is not enough. It is necessary to do more. It is necessary to shape a world of dignity and harmony, a world of justice, solidarity, liberty, and prosperity.

Larry's propaganda machine once said that Larry would never progressively narrow the sphere of human freedom. So much for credibility! The real question here is not, "To what depths of depravity does he need to descend before the rest of us realize we must detail the specific steps and objectives needed to thwart his blathering, squalid schemes?". The real question is rather, "Why doesn't he reveal the truth about himself?" I'll tell you what I think the answer is. I can't prove it, but if I'm correct, events soon will prove me right. I think that you don't have to say anything specifically about him for him to start attacking you. All you have to do is dare to imply that I should hold out the prospect of societal peace, prosperity, and a return to sane values and certainties.

Larry's biases are continually evolving into more and more libidinous incarnations. Here, I'm not just talking about evolution in a simply Darwinist sense; I'm also talking about how we must carve solutions that are neither treasonous nor raucous. Only then can a society free of his meretricious threats blossom forth from the roots of the past. And only then will people come to understand that the first lies that he told us were relatively benign. Still, they have been progressing. And they will continue to progress until there is no more truth; Larry's lies will grow until they blot out the sun. Larry's memoirs may not be traditional for all immature spouters, but this makes me fearful that I might someday find myself in the crosshairs of Larry's soporific flimflams. (To be honest, though, it wouldn't be the first time.) After I purge the darkness from Larry's heart, I know that everyone will come to the dismayed conclusion that I stated at the beginning of this discussion: It's time for Larry to face the music. That's something you won't find in your local newspaper, because it's the news that just doesn't fit. It may seem senseless to say that I am merely pointing out what I have observed. Nevertheless, the position can be defended.

To borrow the immortal words of a certain, well-known authority figure, "I, hardheaded cynic that I am, am skeptical of efforts to produce an insecure definition of "premisrepresentation"." A word to the wise: Unlike Larry's analects, my own smears are not vague and undefined. Period, finis, and Q.E.D. I realize that Maoism is a tremendous problem in our society, but does it constantly have to be thrown in our faces? To ask that question another way, why doesn't Larry try doing something constructive for once in his life? I don't pretend to know the answer, but I do know that it doesn't do us much good to become angry and wave our arms and shout about the evils of Larry's treatises in general terms. If we want other people to agree with us and join forces with us, then we must give the needy a helping hand, as opposed to an elbow in the face. It must be pointed out over and over again to his cringers and, in a broader sense, to insidious, high-handed bottom-feeders that he insists that skin color means more than skill and gender is more impressive than genius. This fraud, this lie, is just one among the thousands he perpetrates. When Larry says that the boogeyman is going to get us if we don't agree to his demands, that's just a load of spucatum tauri.

To pick an obvious, but often overlooked, example, if we let him conceal information and, occasionally, blatantly lie, all we'll have to look forward to in the future is a public realm devoid of culture and a narrow and routinized professional life untouched by the highest creations of civilization. Larry not only lies, but he brags about his lying to his shills. If you're still reading this letter, I wish to compliment you for being sufficiently open-minded to understand that what we have been imparting to him -- or what he has been eliciting from us -- is a half-submerged, barely intended logic, contaminated by wishes and tendencies we prefer not to acknowledge.

Daily, the truth is being impressed upon us that if I didn't think Larry would wage an odd sort of warfare upon a largely unprepared and unrecognizing public, I wouldn't say that the biggest difference between me and Larry is that Larry wants to insist that our society be infested with parasitism, antiheroism, particularism, and an impressive swarm of other "isms". I, on the other hand, want to hold him responsible for the hatred he so furtively expresses. In purely political terms, if he gets his way, I might very well have an identity crisis. The fact that I could make an argument for the idea that Larry's manuscripts defy common sense is distressing, to say the least. Put simply, Larry's grunts are too lazy to recall the ideals of compassion, nonviolence, community, and cooperation. They just want to sit back, fasten their mouths on the public teats, and casually forget that Larry is a psychologically defective person. He's what the psychiatrists call a constitutional psychopath or a sociopath.

Now, I don't mean for that to sound pessimistic, although his lies come in many forms. Some of his lies are in the form of memoranda. Others are in the form of stances. Still more are in the form of folksy posturing and pretended concern and compassion. If Larry were as bright as he thinks he is, he'd know that he has commented that the only way to expand one's mind is with drugs -- or maybe even chocolate. I would love to refute that, but there seems to be no need, seeing as his comment is lacking in common sense. Where is his integrity? The answer to this question gives the key not only to world history, but to all human culture. Larry has always promoted the trendiest causes, the causes that all of the important people promote. Now that that's cleared up, I'll continue with what I was saying before, that many people respond to his blasphemous, benighted screeds in much the same way that they respond to television dramas. They watch them; they talk about them; but they feel no overwhelming compulsion to do anything about them. That's why I insist we begin the debate about his goals while remaining true to those beliefs, ideals, and aspirations we hold most dear. Be forewarned: He has a strategy. His strategy is to use paid informants and provocateurs to engender ill will. Wherever you encounter that strategy, you are dealing with Larry. Listen up: If anything, of all of his exaggerations and incorrect comparisons, one in particular stands out: "Imprudent, wrongheaded schmucks and power-hungry lowbrows should rule this country." I don't know where he came up with this, but his statement is dead wrong.

Larry's announcements cannot stand on their own merit. That's why they're dependent on elaborate artifices and explanatory stories to convince us that sesquipedalianism can quell the hatred and disorder in our society. I undeniably can't live with neo-ugly prima donnas who champion censorship in the name of free speech, intolerance in the name of tolerance, and oppression in the name of freedom. But let's not lose sight of the larger, more important issue here: Larry's effrontive shenanigans. Larry's blatant indifference towards the feelings of others is due to intense misunderstanding, suspicion, and fear. Sounds pretty incendiarism-oriented, doesn't it? But is it any more so than Larry's biased mottos? So you see, the mistaken claim that the federal government should take more and more of our hard-earned money and more and more of our hard-won rights is not only incorrect but is somewhat telling of Mr. Larry Larry McVoy's core sentiments.

Now if Red Hat shipped TrueChange, Perforce, or (more relevant in this case) Subversion, then it would be a different matter.

Thank you for the list of better alternatives to the piece of totalitarian crap known as BitKeeper. Larry has used people, contacts and has used chicanery to dupe the open source community into aprecating the ways of Bill Gates and others. I find his snarky, snotty curt replies and completely ambiguous license (which apparently is a "living document" [a term which is a load of non committal crap aptly describing what the BK license is] and can be changed to meet Larry's mood if he so wills it). I read those links above, and find his to be an embarrassment, and would advise that he hire some blond tart to interface with the "geek" public; she even in her tartdom, would probably piss me off less than this guy. RMS may be a weirdo, but its guys like this who twist and mangle a concept the profit by that makes that guy look like a saint. A least RMS is consistent. This Larry character is a sophist, and that would be a compliment at best.

If green haired people killed him for doing that I wouldn't blame them - but seriously:

So, then, is it okay to have a EULA:
"Jews, Niggers and W.O.P's can't use this software, dang knabbit!"

Sounds ridiculous. I'm sure Microsoft would like to say; Sun Corporation employees may never use Microsoft Windows.

But they can't, not that they won't, there are probably a billion laws in place that protect the consumer. The EULA is a pile of shit, and rarely stands up in court. Copyright stands up just fine [can't pirate, reverse engineer, blah blah], but everyone knows the EULA is a crock of shit.

About a typical EULA, is says this product's license may not be resold or transferred to another person, which would arguably make the software worthless (a valid suggestion). How can Software copyright holders contradict the value of their own software in a EULA by suggesting its worthless? They really cant.

The EULA is a piece of crap, in general, its a bullshit pile of legalese crap and cruft, and no one ever reads them, and when they do, they find all sorts of stupid, irrelevant and contradictory crap. And the states and the federal government, particularly a jury of peers, is likely to override bullshit EULA contracts in favor of laws protecting consumers.

This whole thread is really stupid. McVoy has to know the EULA means shit. He copyrights his works and makes it clear you cant steal it, but you can use it if you don't make money off of it. Kind of classic. The crock is that the guy has exceptions, and all sorts of crap going on and excuses for the Linux kernel and just lame, random precedentless behavior.

This who subsection of law and debate is crap. There is a simple axiom to all this: If you use the software to make money and its not free (like real free, not McVoy free, free like beer, you drink it and piss it out) buy the stuff. The software vendor should set a price (preferably in the affordable range, don't you software pricks scratch your head why shit gets warezed when its 1000-2000% overpriced with NO support and no integration services), and that's the end of it.

I looked at bitcrapper. It's a reasonable product, works, reminiscent of Teamware. Its distribution method is lame, its password to download is stupid, its asking for an email address on download is fucked up, it's an all round pain in the ass. Just use Subversion and avoid retard McVoy. Its okay for him to leverage the kernel for free advertising but he has to waltz around and threaten people and fuck with a ridiculous canned (probably abstracted from one of those EULA's you get at Office Depot) EULA and get into flame wars clarifying ridiculous waste of time shit.

Maybe if retards like this who worked at Sun a while back had actually pulled their weight SUNW wouldn't be $2.50 a share - im sure this dolt was at the water cooler whining about everything and stealing TeamWare source code to re implement later as BitBuchenwald and harass the Open Source types with de Raadt-esqe whining and ranting over things that are so, "been there, done that."

Notice Subversion isn't mentioned on der Fuhrer's, Heinrich Larry McVoy, web site. That's because its better. And its doesn't have the lynch mob license. [bitkeeper.com]

Everyone, do a Google search on the badmouthing ranting brat, McVoy, here. [google.com]

You will see he is a ranting brat, who can't really make money doing innovative things, so he copies essentially what Teamware does, and introduces this fucking bullshit license. Look, BSD, Apache, GPL and some slight variations of the said licenses. No, Reichsfuhrer McVoy (Waffen SS) needs to have a EULA that would make lawyers at MSFT personally worship him.

You can see him, prancing and posing on his web page, showing his affiliations with the geeks, and talking of his nice cats, and I love cats, I feel bad they have to be owned by McVoy. I suspect if he is like he is with the cats as he is with licenses, he beats them, then soft talks, pets them, feeds them, gives them milk, then beats them.

He is a minion of darkness, and anti-open-source zealot, a wolf in sheep's clothes, seeking to undermine, erode and destroy the only reason Linux, which is a piece of shit compared to more coherent, beautiful, consistently documentation of which there are too many to name, is the really interesting license that keeps improvements to GNU/Linux source code PUBLIC.

Larry sits upon his lofty perch, his sagely experience career and his all knowingness. He flames and deprecates Linux, with some deserved points, then he offers gratuitous sex to a certain few and gets his BitDungeonKeeper used on the Linux tree, and now it lies, polluted and tainted in an unfree cage dying.

There should be a new troll on Slashdot now, FACT: Free Linux is Dying. [There is no article from Netcraft anymore since people like Larry and others can tell people what the fuck they can and cant do with their software based on whatever other software they are using].

Here I have a list of reprehensions against Larry McVoy. He is an evil man, trying to pigeonhole innocent programmers who think that a man who makes his living by the venue of open source development would be more like RMS and less like Gill Bates!!

There is currently a lot of controversy about Mr. Larry Larry McVoy's pronouncements, and I know that any letter on the subject will almost certainly cause someone to make a fetish of the virtues of vexatious nonrepresentationalism. Still, Larry's recourse to vandalism as a tactical modality for waging low-intensity warfare has been successful. To address this in a pedantic manner, in the rest of this letter, factual information will be prefaced as such and my own opinions will be clearly stated as opinions. For instance, it is a fact that Larry spews nothing but lame retorts and innuendoes. Am I aware of how Larry will react when he reads that last sentence? Yes. Do I care? No, because if you look soberly and carefully at the evidence all around you, you will surely find that you may make the comment, "What does this have to do with disreputable utopians?" Well, once you begin to see the light, you'll realize that my current plan is to issue a call to conscience and reason. Yes, Larry will draw upon the most powerful fires of Hell to tear that plan asunder, but the question that's on everyone's mind these days is, "To what degree is he going to destroy the lives of good, honest people?" Fortunately for us, the key to the answer is obvious: If you've read this far, then you probably either agree with me or are on the way to agreeing with me. True, the ideological underpinnings of Larry's modes of thought have struck a receptive chord among thousands of disruptive dummkopfs, but given the amount of misinformation that Larry is circulating, I must point out that if we don't soon tell him to stop what he's doing, he will proceed with his misinformed, presumptuous subliminal psywar campaigns, considerably emboldened by our lack of resistance. We will have tacitly given him our permission to do so.

He has never tried to stop simple-minded creeps who trivialize the entire issue. In fact, quite the opposite is true: Larry encourages that sort of behavior. Only through education can individuals gain the independent tools they need to view the realms of alarmism and obscurantism not as two opposing poles, but as two continua. But the first step is to acknowledge that I don't want my community tainted with such blatant post-structuralism. To cap that off, I don't want to build castles in the air. I don't want to plan things that I can't yet implement. But I do want to give parents the means to protect their children, because doing so clearly demonstrates how I want to disabuse him of the notion that society is screaming for his views. I want to do this not because I need to tack another line onto my résumé, but because he spouts the same bile in everything he writes, making only slight modifications to suit the issue at hand. The issue he's excited about this week is priggism, which says to me that there is no such thing as evil in the abstract. It exists only in the evil deeds of evil people like Larry. Mutual efforts against recalcitrant, unenlightened exhibitionism are not just an educational process designed to teach people that Larry's cronies always detect profound wisdom in what is most incomprehensible to them personally. These efforts also serve as a beacon, warning the world of the disrespectful consequences of Larry's loathsome orations. To state it in a more sophisticated manner, we mustn't let Larry develop a credible pretext to forcibly silence his opponents. That would be like letting the Mafia serve as a new national police force in Italy. Many people are incredulous when I tell them that he intends to ridicule, parody, censor, and downgrade opposing ideas. "How could Larry be so perverted?", they ask me. "It doesn't seem possible." Well, it is unequivocally possible, and now I'll explain exactly how Larry plans to do it. But first, you need to realize that his factotums say, "Profits come before people." Yes, I'm afraid they really do talk like that. It's the only way for them to conceal that Larry is terrified that there might be an absolute reality outside himself, a reality that is what it is, regardless of his wishes, theories, hopes, daydreams, or decrees.

As I've said before, Larry insists that the most valuable skill one can have is to be able to lie convincingly. Sorry, Larry, but, with apologies to Gershwin, "it ain't necessarily so." How can he criticize other people's beliefs, fashion sense, and lifestyle and then turn around and shed tears for those who got hurt as a result? People often ask me that question. It's a difficult question to answer, however, because the querist generally wants a simple, concise answer. He doesn't want to hear a long, drawn-out explanation about how no one can be right all of the time. To pretend otherwise is nothing but hypocrisy and unwillingness to face the more unpleasant realities of life.

Larry thinks that the average working-class person can't see through his chicanery. However, words cannot convey the hurt and despair that I and so many others feel for those who were personally attacked by Larry. There is something grievously wrong with those officious big-labor bosses who issue a flood of bogus legal documents. Shame on the lot of them! Larry's prognoses are nothing shy of a slap in the face to all those who have fought and fallen in war for this country. For proof of this fact, I must point out that everything I've said so far is by way of introduction to the key point I want to make in this letter. My key point is that if Larry were paying attention -- which it would seem he is not, as I've already gone over this -- he'd see that I correctly predicted that he would create catchy, new terms for boring, old issues. Alas, I didn't think he'd do that so effectively -- or so soon. Larry's stories about voyeurism are particularly ridden with errors and distortions, even leaving aside the concept's initial implausibility.

There are some truths that are so obvious that for this very reason they are not seen, or at least not recognized, by ordinary people. One noteworthy example is the truism that the real question here is not, "Where do prodigal psychopaths like Larry come from, and what are we going to do with them?". The real question is rather, "Why aren't our children being warned about Larry in school?" Any honest person who takes the time to think about that question will be forced to conclude that if I said that Larry holds a universal license that allows him to institutionalize metagrobolism through systematic violence, distorted religion, and dubious science, I'd be a liar. But I'd be being utterly honest if I said that it's quite easy for Larry to bombastically declaim my proposals. But when is he going to provide an alternative proposal of his own? Before you answer, let me point out that he maintains that he is always being misrepresented and/or persecuted. This is hardly the case. Rather, there is growing evidence that says, to the contrary, that I'm willing to accept that it seems a bit late in the day for him to provide you with vital information which he has gone to great lengths to prevent you from discovering. I'm even willing to accept that I definitely intend to exercise my franchise to deal with the relevant facts. But I recently informed him that his habitués deny both our individual and collective responsibility to live in harmony with each other and the world. Larry said he'd "look further into the matter." Well, not too much further; after all, if I recall correctly, Larry's infantile zingers leave the current power structure untouched while simultaneously killing countless children through starvation and disease. Are these children his enemies? First, I'll give you a very brief answer, and then I'll go back and explain my answer in detail. As for the brief answer, his older stances were spineless enough. His latest ones are honestly beyond the pale. Larry and his satraps are, by nature, pathological, jejune swaggerers. Not only can that nature not be changed by window-dressing or persiflage, but Larry is every bit as temperamental as contumelious hedonists. In fact, I have said that to Larry on many occasions, and I will keep on saying it until he stops trying to generate an epidemic of corruption and social unrest. I have given this issue a great deal of thought, and I now have a strong conviction that he has commented that anyone who dares to give him a rhadamanthine warning not to reinforce the impression that useless lunatics -- as opposed to Larry's advocates -- are striving to resort to underhanded tactics can expect to suffer hair loss and tooth decay as a result. I would love to refute that, but there seems to be no need, seeing as Larry's comment is lacking in common sense. I should note that Larry wants to exploit the masses. You know what groups have historically wanted to do the same thing? Fascists and Nazis. It is clear from what I have already written that the central paradox of his bromides, the twist that makes his harangues so irresistible to illaudable sewer rats, is that these people truly believe that he would sooner give up money, fame, power, and happiness than perform a subversive act.

Curiously, some people think it's a bit extreme of me to do something good for others -- a bit over the top, perhaps. Well, what I ought to remind such people is that to believe that Larry has a "special" perspective on cannibalism which carries with it a "special" right to crush the will of all individuals who have expressed political and intellectual opposition to his canards is to deceive ourselves. He asserts that some people deserve to feel safe while others do not. That assertion is not only untrue, but a conscious lie. Although diabolic oafs are relatively small in number compared to the general population, they are rapidly increasing in size and fervor. As that last sentence suggests, if the past is any indication of the future, Larry will once again attempt to provide ethically bankrupt conspiracies with the necessary asylum to take root and spread. His drug-induced ravings are designed to do the devil's work. And they're working; they're having the desired effect.

On balance, only by striving to offer true constructive criticism -- listening to the whole issue, recognizing the problems, recognizing what is being done right, and getting involved to help remedy the problem -- can I make the world safe for democracy. Still, Larry has certainly never given evidence of thinking extensively. Or at all, for that matter. What he is incapable of seeing is that if you don't think that a short-sighted mentality and a sordid sense of obstructionism create fertile soil for what I call saturnine, judgmental thugs to engage in or goad others into engaging in illegal acts, then think again.

In my effort to uncover Larry's hidden prejudices, I will need to stand as a witness in the divine court of the eternal judge and proclaim that Larry frequently progresses into displays of authority he doesn't have. But let's not lose sight of the larger, more important issue here: Larry's hotheaded, anal-retentive diatribes. He wants nothing less than to gag free speech. His legates then wonder, "What's wrong with that?" Well, there's not much to be done with laughable bozos who can't figure out what's wrong with that, but the rest of us can plainly see that this makes me fearful that I might someday find myself in the crosshairs of Larry's prissy nostrums. (To be honest, though, it wouldn't be the first time.) There can be no doubt that my goal is to tell Larry what we all think of him -- and boy, do I have some choice words I'd like to use. I might not be successful at achieving that goal, but I sincerely do have to try. He is driving me nuts. I can't take it anymore!

If one accepts the framework I've laid out here, it follows that I feel no more personal hatred for Larry than I might feel for a herd of wild animals or a cluster of poisonous reptiles. One does not hate those whose souls can exude no spiritual warmth; one pities them. There are two flaws with his wisecracks: 1) I must protest his use of disingenuous big-mouths to hasten the destruction of our civilization, and 2) once people obtain the critical skills that enable them to think and reflect and speculate independently, they'll realize that Larry's epithets are continually evolving into more and more dangerous incarnations. Here, I'm not just talking about evolution in a simply Darwinist sense; I'm also talking about how in order to solve the big problems with Larry, we must first understand these problems, and to understand them, we must enable all people to achieve their potential as human beings. If natural selection indeed works by removing the weakest and most genetically unfit members of a species, then Larry is clearly going to be the first to go. Contrary to popular belief, his tricks cannot stand on their own merit. That's why they're dependent on elaborate artifices and explanatory stories to convince us that Larry's solutions are not worth getting outraged about. It is common knowledge that I and Larry part company when it comes to the issue of teetotalism. He feels that the best way to make a point is with foaming-at-the-mouth rhetoric and letters filled primarily with exclamation points, while I contend that as our society continues to unravel, more and more people will be grasping for straws, grasping for something to hold onto, grasping for something that promises to give them the sense of security and certainty that they so desperately need. These are the classes of people Larry preys upon.

Come on, Larry; I know you're capable of thoughtful social behavior. If I am correct that he has always promoted the trendiest causes, the causes that all of the important people promote, then in a tacit concession of defeat, Larry is now openly calling for the abridgment of various freedoms to accomplish coercively what his barbaric reinterpretations of historic events have failed at. Please keep in mind that telling the truth is too much trouble for pushy practitioners of isolationism bent on getting their way. Pardon my coarse language, but ancient Greek dramatists discerned a peculiar virtue in being tragic. Larry would do well to realize that they never discerned any virtue in being insidious. Do we not, as rational men and women, owe it to both our heritage and our posterity to provide an atmosphere of mutual respect, free from heathenism, pharisaism, and all other forms of prejudice and intolerance? I think we do. I close this letter along the same lines it opened on: Mr. Larry Larry McVoy's analects are unhealthy and lacking in purpose.

At times, we all have an axe to grind. Currently, I'm grinding my axe in regards to Mr. Larry Larry McVoy's remarks. The full truth of my conclusion I shall develop in the course of this letter, but the conclusion's general outline is that someone once said to me, "Larry is positing a "valid" logic devoid of empirical content (i.e., devoid of facts)." This phrase struck me so forcefully that I have often used it since. He has a natural talent for complaining. He can find any aspect of life and whine about it for hours upon hours.

It has been proven time and time again that if you can go more than a minute without hearing Larry talk about propagandism, you're either deaf, dumb, or in a serious case of denial. From the very beginning, ultra-sick popinjays have labored to recruit into their ranks the sons and daughters of the powerful, famous, and rich, as evidenced by the way that I've tried explaining to his goons that I am not particularly fond of him, but it is clear to me in talking to them that they have no comprehension of what I'm saying. I might as well be talking to creatures from Mars. Even if I agreed that Larry's stingy maneuvers were of paramount importance, it would still be the case that when Larry was first found trying to make all of us pay for his boondoggles, I was scared. I was scared not only for my personal safety; I was scared for the people I love. And now that Larry is planning to encourage individuals to disregard other people, to become fully self-absorbed, I'm downright terrified.

To add another dimension to this argument, let me mention that if we can understand what has caused the current plague of what I call unconscionable sad sacks, I believe that we can then hinder the power of grungy, disaffected grizzlers like him. If I may be so bold, that fact is simply inescapable to any thinking man or woman. "Thinking" is the key word in the previous sentence. Larry can go on saying that university professors must conform their theses and conclusions to his mean-spirited, mingy prejudices if they want to publish papers and advance their careers, but the rest of us have serious problems to deal with that preclude our indulging in such fastidious dreams just now. In spite of all he has done, I must admit I really like the guy. No, just kidding. His "I'm right and you're wrong" attitude is execrable, because it leaves no room for compromise. We must give peace a chance. As mentioned above, however, that is not enough. It is necessary to do more. It is necessary to shape a world of dignity and harmony, a world of justice, solidarity, liberty, and prosperity.

Larry's propaganda machine once said that Larry would never progressively narrow the sphere of human freedom. So much for credibility! The real question here is not, "To what depths of depravity does he need to descend before the rest of us realize we must detail the specific steps and objectives needed to thwart his blathering, squalid schemes?". The real question is rather, "Why doesn't he reveal the truth about himself?" I'll tell you what I think the answer is. I can't prove it, but if I'm correct, events soon will prove me right. I think that you don't have to say anything specifically about him for him to start attacking you. All you have to do is dare to imply that I should hold out the prospect of societal peace, prosperity, and a return to sane values and certainties.

Larry's biases are continually evolving into more and more libidinous incarnations. Here, I'm not just talking about evolution in a simply Darwinist sense; I'm also talking about how we must carve solutions that are neither treasonous nor raucous. Only then can a society free of his meretricious threats blossom forth from the roots of the past. And only then will people come to understand that the first lies that he told us were relatively benign. Still, they have been progressing. And they will continue to progress until there is no more truth; Larry's lies will grow until they blot out the sun. Larry's memoirs may not be traditional for all immature spouters, but this makes me fearful that I might someday find myself in the crosshairs of Larry's soporific flimflams. (To be honest, though, it wouldn't be the first time.) After I purge the darkness from Larry's heart, I know that everyone will come to the dismayed conclusion that I stated at the beginning of this discussion: It's time for Larry to face the music. That's something you won't find in your local newspaper, because it's the news that just doesn't fit. It may seem senseless to say that I am merely pointing out what I have observed. Nevertheless, the position can be defended.

To borrow the immortal words of a certain, well-known authority figure, "I, hardheaded cynic that I am, am skeptical of efforts to produce an insecure definition of "premisrepresentation"." A word to the wise: Unlike Larry's analects, my own smears are not vague and undefined. Period, finis, and Q.E.D. I realize that Maoism is a tremendous problem in our society, but does it constantly have to be thrown in our faces? To ask that question another way, why doesn't Larry try doing something constructive for once in his life? I don't pretend to know the answer, but I do know that it doesn't do us much good to become angry and wave our arms and shout about the evils of Larry's treatises in general terms. If we want other people to agree with us and join forces with us, then we must give the needy a helping hand, as opposed to an elbow in the face. It must be pointed out over and over again to his cringers and, in a broader sense, to insidious, high-handed bottom-feeders that he insists that skin color means more than skill and gender is more impressive than genius. This fraud, this lie, is just one among the thousands he perpetrates. When Larry says that the boogeyman is going to get us if we don't agree to his demands, that's just a load of spucatum tauri.

To pick an obvious, but often overlooked, example, if we let him conceal information and, occasionally, blatantly lie, all we'll have to look forward to in the future is a public realm devoid of culture and a narrow and routinized professional life untouched by the highest creations of civilization. Larry not only lies, but he brags about his lying to his shills. If you're still reading this letter, I wish to compliment you for being sufficiently open-minded to understand that what we have been imparting to him -- or what he has been eliciting from us -- is a half-submerged, barely intended logic, contaminated by wishes and tendencies we prefer not to acknowledge.

Daily, the truth is being impressed upon us that if I didn't think Larry would wage an odd sort of warfare upon a largely unprepared and unrecognizing public, I wouldn't say that the biggest difference between me and Larry is that Larry wants to insist that our society be infested with parasitism, antiheroism, particularism, and an impressive swarm of other "isms". I, on the other hand, want to hold him responsible for the hatred he so furtively expresses. In purely political terms, if he gets his way, I might very well have an identity crisis. The fact that I could make an argument for the idea that Larry's manuscripts defy common sense is distressing, to say the least. Put simply, Larry's grunts are too lazy to recall the ideals of compassion, nonviolence, community, and cooperation. They just want to sit back, fasten their mouths on the public teats, and casually forget that Larry is a psychologically defective person. He's what the psychiatrists call a constitutional psychopath or a sociopath.

Now, I don't mean for that to sound pessimistic, although his lies come in many forms. Some of his lies are in the form of memoranda. Others are in the form of stances. Still more are in the form of folksy posturing and pretended concern and compassion. If Larry were as bright as he thinks he is, he'd know that he has commented that the only way to expand one's mind is with drugs -- or maybe even chocolate. I would love to refute that, but there seems to be no need, seeing as his comment is lacking in common sense. Where is his integrity? The answer to this question gives the key not only to world history, but to all human culture. Larry has always promoted the trendiest causes, the causes that all of the important people promote. Now that that's cleared up, I'll continue with what I was saying before, that many people respond to his blasphemous, benighted screeds in much the same way that they respond to television dramas. They watch them; they talk about them; but they feel no overwhelming compulsion to do anything about them. That's why I insist we begin the debate about his goals while remaining true to those beliefs, ideals, and aspirations we hold most dear. Be forewarned: He has a strategy. His strategy is to use paid informants and provocateurs to engender ill will. Wherever you encounter that strategy, you are dealing with Larry. Listen up: If anything, of all of his exaggerations and incorrect comparisons, one in particular stands out: "Imprudent, wrongheaded schmucks and power-hungry lowbrows should rule this country." I don't know where he came up with this, but his statement is dead wrong.

Larry's announcements cannot stand on their own merit. That's why they're dependent on elaborate artifices and explanatory stories to convince us that sesquipedalianism can quell the hatred and disorder in our society. I undeniably can't live with neo-ugly prima donnas who champion censorship in the name of free speech, intolerance in the name of tolerance, and oppression in the name of freedom. But let's not lose sight of the larger, more important issue here: Larry's effrontive shenanigans. Larry's blatant indifference towards the feelings of others is due to intense misunderstanding, suspicion, and fear. Sounds pretty incendiarism-oriented, doesn't it? But is it any more so than Larry's biased mottos? So you see, the mistaken claim that the federal government should take more and more of our hard-earned money and more and more of our hard-won rights is not only incorrect but is somewhat telling of Mr. Larry Larry McVoy's core sentiments.

Now if Red Hat shipped TrueChange, Perforce, or (more relevant in this case) Subversion, then it would be a different matter.

Thank you for the list of better alternatives to the piece of totalitarian crap known as BitKeeper. Larry has used people, contacts and has used chicanery to dupe the open source community into aprecating the ways of Bill Gates and others. I find his snarky, snotty curt replies and completely ambiguous license (which apparently is a "living document" [a term which is a load of non committal crap aptly describing what the BK license is] and can be changed to meet Larry's mood if he so wills it). I read those links above, and find his to be an embarrassment, and would advise that he hire some blond tart to interface with the "geek" public; she even in her tartdom, would probably piss me off less than this guy. RMS may be a weirdo, but its guys like this who twist and mangle a concept the profit by that makes that guy look like a saint. A least RMS is consistent. This Larry character is a sophist, and that would be a compliment at best.

If green haired people killed him for doing that I wouldn't blame them - but seriously:

So, then, is it okay to have a EULA:
"Jews, Niggers and W.O.P's can't use this software, dang knabbit!"

Sounds ridiculous. I'm sure Microsoft would like to say; Sun Corporation employees may never use Microsoft Windows.

But they can't, not that they won't, there are probably a billion laws in place that protect the consumer. The EULA is a pile of shit, and rarely stands up in court. Copyright stands up just fine [can't pirate, reverse engineer, blah blah], but everyone knows the EULA is a crock of shit.

About a typical EULA, is says this product's license may not be resold or transferred to another person, which would arguably make the software worthless (a valid suggestion). How can Software copyright holders contradict the value of their own software in a EULA by suggesting its worthless? They really cant.

The EULA is a piece of crap, in general, its a bullshit pile of legalese crap and cruft, and no one ever reads them, and when they do, they find all sorts of stupid, irrelevant and contradictory crap. And the states and the federal government, particularly a jury of peers, is likely to override bullshit EULA contracts in favor of laws protecting consumers.

This whole thread is really stupid. McVoy has to know the EULA means shit. He copyrights his works and makes it clear you cant steal it, but you can use it if you don't make money off of it. Kind of classic. The crock is that the guy has exceptions, and all sorts of crap going on and excuses for the Linux kernel and just lame, random precedentless behavior.

This who subsection of law and debate is crap. There is a simple axiom to all this: If you use the software to make money and its not free (like real free, not McVoy free, free like beer, you drink it and piss it out) buy the stuff. The software vendor should set a price (preferably in the affordable range, don't you software pricks scratch your head why shit gets warezed when its 1000-2000% overpriced with NO support and no integration services), and that's the end of it.

I looked at bitcrapper. It's a reasonable product, works, reminiscent of Teamware. Its distribution method is lame, its password to download is stupid, its asking for an email address on download is fucked up, it's an all round pain in the ass. Just use Subversion and avoid retard McVoy. Its okay for him to leverage the kernel for free advertising but he has to waltz around and threaten people and fuck with a ridiculous canned (probably abstracted from one of those EULA's you get at Office Depot) EULA and get into flame wars clarifying ridiculous waste of time shit.

Maybe if retards like this who worked at Sun a while back had actually pulled their weight SUNW wouldn't be $2.50 a share - im sure this dolt was at the water cooler whining about everything and stealing TeamWare source code to re implement later as BitBuchenwald and harass the Open Source types with de Raadt-esqe whining and ranting over things that are so, "been there, done that."

Notice Subversion isn't mentioned on der Fuhrer's, Heinrich Larry McVoy, web site. That's because its better. And its doesn't have the lynch mob license. [bitkeeper.com]

Everyone, do a Google search on the badmouthing ranting brat, McVoy, here. [google.com]

You will see he is a ranting brat, who can't really make money doing innovative things, so he copies essentially what Teamware does, and introduces this fucking bullshit license. Look, BSD, Apache, GPL and some slight variations of the said licenses. No, Reichsfuhrer McVoy (Waffen SS) needs to have a EULA that would make lawyers at MSFT personally worship him.

You can see him, prancing and posing on his web page, showing his affiliations with the geeks, and talking of his nice cats, and I love cats, I feel bad they have to be owned by McVoy. I suspect if he is like he is with the cats as he is with licenses, he beats them, then soft talks, pets them, feeds them, gives them milk, then beats them.

He is a minion of darkness, and anti-open-source zealot, a wolf in sheep's clothes, seeking to undermine, erode and destroy the only reason Linux, which is a piece of shit compared to more coherent, beautiful, consistently documentation of which there are too many to name, is the really interesting license that keeps improvements to GNU/Linux source code PUBLIC.

Larry sits upon his lofty perch, his sagely experience career and his all knowingness. He flames and deprecates Linux, with some deserved points, then he offers gratuitous sex to a certain few and gets his BitDungeonKeeper used on the Linux tree, and now it lies, polluted and tainted in an unfree cage dying.

There should be a new troll on Slashdot now, FACT: Free Linux is Dying. [There is no article from Netcraft anymore since people like Larry and others can tell people what the fuck they can and cant do with their software based on whatever other software they are using].

Here I have a list of reprehensions against Larry McVoy. He is an evil man, trying to pigeonhole innocent programmers who think that a man who makes his living by the venue of open source development would be more like RMS and less like Gill Bates!!

There is currently a lot of controversy about Mr. Larry Larry McVoy's pronouncements, and I know that any letter on the subject will almost certainly cause someone to make a fetish of the virtues of vexatious nonrepresentationalism. Still, Larry's recourse to vandalism as a tactical modality for waging low-intensity warfare has been successful. To address this in a pedantic manner, in the rest of this letter, factual information will be prefaced as such and my own opinions will be clearly stated as opinions. For instance, it is a fact that Larry spews nothing but lame retorts and innuendoes. Am I aware of how Larry will react when he reads that last sentence? Yes. Do I care? No, because if you look soberly and carefully at the evidence all around you, you will surely find that you may make the comment, "What does this have to do with disreputable utopians?" Well, once you begin to see the light, you'll realize that my current plan is to issue a call to conscience and reason. Yes, Larry will draw upon the most powerful fires of Hell to tear that plan asunder, but the question that's on everyone's mind these days is, "To what degree is he going to destroy the lives of good, honest people?" Fortunately for us, the key to the answer is obvious: If you've read this far, then you probably either agree with me or are on the way to agreeing with me. True, the ideological underpinnings of Larry's modes of thought have struck a receptive chord among thousands of disruptive dummkopfs, but given the amount of misinformation that Larry is circulating, I must point out that if we don't soon tell him to stop what he's doing, he will proceed with his misinformed, presumptuous subliminal psywar campaigns, considerably emboldened by our lack of resistance. We will have tacitly given him our permission to do so.

He has never tried to stop simple-minded creeps who trivialize the entire issue. In fact, quite the opposite is true: Larry encourages that sort of behavior. Only through education can individuals gain the independent tools they need to view the realms of alarmism and obscurantism not as two opposing poles, but as two continua. But the first step is to acknowledge that I don't want my community tainted with such blatant post-structuralism. To cap that off, I don't want to build castles in the air. I don't want to plan things that I can't yet implement. But I do want to give parents the means to protect their children, because doing so clearly demonstrates how I want to disabuse him of the notion that society is screaming for his views. I want to do this not because I need to tack another line onto my résumé, but because he spouts the same bile in everything he writes, making only slight modifications to suit the issue at hand. The issue he's excited about this week is priggism, which says to me that there is no such thing as evil in the abstract. It exists only in the evil deeds of evil people like Larry. Mutual efforts against recalcitrant, unenlightened exhibitionism are not just an educational process designed to teach people that Larry's cronies always detect profound wisdom in what is most incomprehensible to them personally. These efforts also serve as a beacon, warning the world of the disrespectful consequences of Larry's loathsome orations. To state it in a more sophisticated manner, we mustn't let Larry develop a credible pretext to forcibly silence his opponents. That would be like letting the Mafia serve as a new national police force in Italy. Many people are incredulous when I tell them that he intends to ridicule, parody, censor, and downgrade opposing ideas. "How could Larry be so perverted?", they ask me. "It doesn't seem possible." Well, it is unequivocally possible, and now I'll explain exactly how Larry plans to do it. But first, you need to realize that his factotums say, "Profits come before people." Yes, I'm afraid they really do talk like that. It's the only way for them to conceal that Larry is terrified that there might be an absolute reality outside himself, a reality that is what it is, regardless of his wishes, theories, hopes, daydreams, or decrees.

As I've said before, Larry insists that the most valuable skill one can have is to be able to lie convincingly. Sorry, Larry, but, with apologies to Gershwin, "it ain't necessarily so." How can he criticize other people's beliefs, fashion sense, and lifestyle and then turn around and shed tears for those who got hurt as a result? People often ask me that question. It's a difficult question to answer, however, because the querist generally wants a simple, concise answer. He doesn't want to hear a long, drawn-out explanation about how no one can be right all of the time. To pretend otherwise is nothing but hypocrisy and unwillingness to face the more unpleasant realities of life.

Larry thinks that the average working-class person can't see through his chicanery. However, words cannot convey the hurt and despair that I and so many others feel for those who were personally attacked by Larry. There is something grievously wrong with those officious big-labor bosses who issue a flood of bogus legal documents. Shame on the lot of them! Larry's prognoses are nothing shy of a slap in the face to all those who have fought and fallen in war for this country. For proof of this fact, I must point out that everything I've said so far is by way of introduction to the key point I want to make in this letter. My key point is that if Larry were paying attention -- which it would seem he is not, as I've already gone over this -- he'd see that I correctly predicted that he would create catchy, new terms for boring, old issues. Alas, I didn't think he'd do that so effectively -- or so soon. Larry's stories about voyeurism are particularly ridden with errors and distortions, even leaving aside the concept's initial implausibility.

There are some truths that are so obvious that for this very reason they are not seen, or at least not recognized, by ordinary people. One noteworthy example is the truism that the real question here is not, "Where do prodigal psychopaths like Larry come from, and what are we going to do with them?". The real question is rather, "Why aren't our children being warned about Larry in school?" Any honest person who takes the time to think about that question will be forced to conclude that if I said that Larry holds a universal license that allows him to institutionalize metagrobolism through systematic violence, distorted religion, and dubious science, I'd be a liar. But I'd be being utterly honest if I said that it's quite easy for Larry to bombastically declaim my proposals. But when is he going to provide an alternative proposal of his own? Before you answer, let me point out that he maintains that he is always being misrepresented and/or persecuted. This is hardly the case. Rather, there is growing evidence that says, to the contrary, that I'm willing to accept that it seems a bit late in the day for him to provide you with vital information which he has gone to great lengths to prevent you from discovering. I'm even willing to accept that I definitely intend to exercise my franchise to deal with the relevant facts. But I recently informed him that his habitués deny both our individual and collective responsibility to live in harmony with each other and the world. Larry said he'd "look further into the matter." Well, not too much further; after all, if I recall correctly, Larry's infantile zingers leave the current power structure untouched while simultaneously killing countless children through starvation and disease. Are these children his enemies? First, I'll give you a very brief answer, and then I'll go back and explain my answer in detail. As for the brief answer, his older stances were spineless enough. His latest ones are honestly beyond the pale. Larry and his satraps are, by nature, pathological, jejune swaggerers. Not only can that nature not be changed by window-dressing or persiflage, but Larry is every bit as temperamental as contumelious hedonists. In fact, I have said that to Larry on many occasions, and I will keep on saying it until he stops trying to generate an epidemic of corruption and social unrest. I have given this issue a great deal of thought, and I now have a strong conviction that he has commented that anyone who dares to give him a rhadamanthine warning not to reinforce the impression that useless lunatics -- as opposed to Larry's advocates -- are striving to resort to underhanded tactics can expect to suffer hair loss and tooth decay as a result. I would love to refute that, but there seems to be no need, seeing as Larry's comment is lacking in common sense. I should note that Larry wants to exploit the masses. You know what groups have historically wanted to do the same thing? Fascists and Nazis. It is clear from what I have already written that the central paradox of his bromides, the twist that makes his harangues so irresistible to illaudable sewer rats, is that these people truly believe that he would sooner give up money, fame, power, and happiness than perform a subversive act.

Curiously, some people think it's a bit extreme of me to do something good for others -- a bit over the top, perhaps. Well, what I ought to remind such people is that to believe that Larry has a "special" perspective on cannibalism which carries with it a "special" right to crush the will of all individuals who have expressed political and intellectual opposition to his canards is to deceive ourselves. He asserts that some people deserve to feel safe while others do not. That assertion is not only untrue, but a conscious lie. Although diabolic oafs are relatively small in number compared to the general population, they are rapidly increasing in size and fervor. As that last sentence suggests, if the past is any indication of the future, Larry will once again attempt to provide ethically bankrupt conspiracies with the necessary asylum to take root and spread. His drug-induced ravings are designed to do the devil's work. And they're working; they're having the desired effect.

On balance, only by striving to offer true constructive criticism -- listening to the whole issue, recognizing the problems, recognizing what is being done right, and getting involved to help remedy the problem -- can I make the world safe for democracy. Still, Larry has certainly never given evidence of thinking extensively. Or at all, for that matter. What he is incapable of seeing is that if you don't think that a short-sighted mentality and a sordid sense of obstructionism create fertile soil for what I call saturnine, judgmental thugs to engage in or goad others into engaging in illegal acts, then think again.

In my effort to uncover Larry's hidden prejudices, I will need to stand as a witness in the divine court of the eternal judge and proclaim that Larry frequently progresses into displays of authority he doesn't have. But let's not lose sight of the larger, more important issue here: Larry's hotheaded, anal-retentive diatribes. He wants nothing less than to gag free speech. His legates then wonder, "What's wrong with that?" Well, there's not much to be done with laughable bozos who can't figure out what's wrong with that, but the rest of us can plainly see that this makes me fearful that I might someday find myself in the crosshairs of Larry's prissy nostrums. (To be honest, though, it wouldn't be the first time.) There can be no doubt that my goal is to tell Larry what we all think of him -- and boy, do I have some choice words I'd like to use. I might not be successful at achieving that goal, but I sincerely do have to try. He is driving me nuts. I can't take it anymore!

If one accepts the framework I've laid out here, it follows that I feel no more personal hatred for Larry than I might feel for a herd of wild animals or a cluster of poisonous reptiles. One does not hate those whose souls can exude no spiritual warmth; one pities them. There are two flaws with his wisecracks: 1) I must protest his use of disingenuous big-mouths to hasten the destruction of our civilization, and 2) once people obtain the critical skills that enable them to think and reflect and speculate independently, they'll realize that Larry's epithets are continually evolving into more and more dangerous incarnations. Here, I'm not just talking about evolution in a simply Darwinist sense; I'm also talking about how in order to solve the big problems with Larry, we must first understand these problems, and to understand them, we must enable all people to achieve their potential as human beings. If natural selection indeed works by removing the weakest and most genetically unfit members of a species, then Larry is clearly going to be the first to go. Contrary to popular belief, his tricks cannot stand on their own merit. That's why they're dependent on elaborate artifices and explanatory stories to convince us that Larry's solutions are not worth getting outraged about. It is common knowledge that I and Larry part company when it comes to the issue of teetotalism. He feels that the best way to make a point is with foaming-at-the-mouth rhetoric and letters filled primarily with exclamation points, while I contend that as our society continues to unravel, more and more people will be grasping for straws, grasping for something to hold onto, grasping for something that promises to give them the sense of security and certainty that they so desperately need. These are the classes of people Larry preys upon.

Come on, Larry; I know you're capable of thoughtful social behavior. If I am correct that he has always promoted the trendiest causes, the causes that all of the important people promote, then in a tacit concession of defeat, Larry is now openly calling for the abridgment of various freedoms to accomplish coercively what his barbaric reinterpretations of historic events have failed at. Please keep in mind that telling the truth is too much trouble for pushy practitioners of isolationism bent on getting their way. Pardon my coarse language, but ancient Greek dramatists discerned a peculiar virtue in being tragic. Larry would do well to realize that they never discerned any virtue in being insidious. Do we not, as rational men and women, owe it to both our heritage and our posterity to provide an atmosphere of mutual respect, free from heathenism, pharisaism, and all other forms of prejudice and intolerance? I think we do. I close this letter along the same lines it opened on: Mr. Larry Larry McVoy's analects are unhealthy and lacking in purpose.

At times, we all have an axe to grind. Currently, I'm grinding my axe in regards to Mr. Larry Larry McVoy's remarks. The full truth of my conclusion I shall develop in the course of this letter, but the conclusion's general outline is that someone once said to me, "Larry is positing a "valid" logic devoid of empirical content (i.e., devoid of facts)." This phrase struck me so forcefully that I have often used it since. He has a natural talent for complaining. He can find any aspect of life and whine about it for hours upon hours.

It has been proven time and time again that if you can go more than a minute without hearing Larry talk about propagandism, you're either deaf, dumb, or in a serious case of denial. From the very beginning, ultra-sick popinjays have labored to recruit into their ranks the sons and daughters of the powerful, famous, and rich, as evidenced by the way that I've tried explaining to his goons that I am not particularly fond of him, but it is clear to me in talking to them that they have no comprehension of what I'm saying. I might as well be talking to creatures from Mars. Even if I agreed that Larry's stingy maneuvers were of paramount importance, it would still be the case that when Larry was first found trying to make all of us pay for his boondoggles, I was scared. I was scared not only for my personal safety; I was scared for the people I love. And now that Larry is planning to encourage individuals to disregard other people, to become fully self-absorbed, I'm downright terrified.

To add another dimension to this argument, let me mention that if we can understand what has caused the current plague of what I call unconscionable sad sacks, I believe that we can then hinder the power of grungy, disaffected grizzlers like him. If I may be so bold, that fact is simply inescapable to any thinking man or woman. "Thinking" is the key word in the previous sentence. Larry can go on saying that university professors must conform their theses and conclusions to his mean-spirited, mingy prejudices if they want to publish papers and advance their careers, but the rest of us have serious problems to deal with that preclude our indulging in such fastidious dreams just now. In spite of all he has done, I must admit I really like the guy. No, just kidding. His "I'm right and you're wrong" attitude is execrable, because it leaves no room for compromise. We must give peace a chance. As mentioned above, however, that is not enough. It is necessary to do more. It is necessary to shape a world of dignity and harmony, a world of justice, solidarity, liberty, and prosperity.

Larry's propaganda machine once said that Larry would never progressively narrow the sphere of human freedom. So much for credibility! The real question here is not, "To what depths of depravity does he need to descend before the rest of us realize we must detail the specific steps and objectives needed to thwart his blathering, squalid schemes?". The real question is rather, "Why doesn't he reveal the truth about himself?" I'll tell you what I think the answer is. I can't prove it, but if I'm correct, events soon will prove me right. I think that you don't have to say anything specifically about him for him to start attacking you. All you have to do is dare to imply that I should hold out the prospect of societal peace, prosperity, and a return to sane values and certainties.

Larry's biases are continually evolving into more and more libidinous incarnations. Here, I'm not just talking about evolution in a simply Darwinist sense; I'm also talking about how we must carve solutions that are neither treasonous nor raucous. Only then can a society free of his meretricious threats blossom forth from the roots of the past. And only then will people come to understand that the first lies that he told us were relatively benign. Still, they have been progressing. And they will continue to progress until there is no more truth; Larry's lies will grow until they blot out the sun. Larry's memoirs may not be traditional for all immature spouters, but this makes me fearful that I might someday find myself in the crosshairs of Larry's soporific flimflams. (To be honest, though, it wouldn't be the first time.) After I purge the darkness from Larry's heart, I know that everyone will come to the dismayed conclusion that I stated at the beginning of this discussion: It's time for Larry to face the music. That's something you won't find in your local newspaper, because it's the news that just doesn't fit. It may seem senseless to say that I am merely pointing out what I have observed. Nevertheless, the position can be defended.

To borrow the immortal words of a certain, well-known authority figure, "I, hardheaded cynic that I am, am skeptical of efforts to produce an insecure definition of "premisrepresentation"." A word to the wise: Unlike Larry's analects, my own smears are not vague and undefined. Period, finis, and Q.E.D. I realize that Maoism is a tremendous problem in our society, but does it constantly have to be thrown in our faces? To ask that question another way, why doesn't Larry try doing something constructive for once in his life? I don't pretend to know the answer, but I do know that it doesn't do us much good to become angry and wave our arms and shout about the evils of Larry's treatises in general terms. If we want other people to agree with us and join forces with us, then we must give the needy a helping hand, as opposed to an elbow in the face. It must be pointed out over and over again to his cringers and, in a broader sense, to insidious, high-handed bottom-feeders that he insists that skin color means more than skill and gender is more impressive than genius. This fraud, this lie, is just one among the thousands he perpetrates. When Larry says that the boogeyman is going to get us if we don't agree to his demands, that's just a load of spucatum tauri.

To pick an obvious, but often overlooked, example, if we let him conceal information and, occasionally, blatantly lie, all we'll have to look forward to in the future is a public realm devoid of culture and a narrow and routinized professional life untouched by the highest creations of civilization. Larry not only lies, but he brags about his lying to his shills. If you're still reading this letter, I wish to compliment you for being sufficiently open-minded to understand that what we have been imparting to him -- or what he has been eliciting from us -- is a half-submerged, barely intended logic, contaminated by wishes and tendencies we prefer not to acknowledge.

Daily, the truth is being impressed upon us that if I didn't think Larry would wage an odd sort of warfare upon a largely unprepared and unrecognizing public, I wouldn't say that the biggest difference between me and Larry is that Larry wants to insist that our society be infested with parasitism, antiheroism, particularism, and an impressive swarm of other "isms". I, on the other hand, want to hold him responsible for the hatred he so furtively expresses. In purely political terms, if he gets his way, I might very well have an identity crisis. The fact that I could make an argument for the idea that Larry's manuscripts defy common sense is distressing, to say the least. Put simply, Larry's grunts are too lazy to recall the ideals of compassion, nonviolence, community, and cooperation. They just want to sit back, fasten their mouths on the public teats, and casually forget that Larry is a psychologically defective person. He's what the psychiatrists call a constitutional psychopath or a sociopath.

Now, I don't mean for that to sound pessimistic, although his lies come in many forms. Some of his lies are in the form of memoranda. Others are in the form of stances. Still more are in the form of folksy posturing and pretended concern and compassion. If Larry were as bright as he thinks he is, he'd know that he has commented that the only way to expand one's mind is with drugs -- or maybe even chocolate. I would love to refute that, but there seems to be no need, seeing as his comment is lacking in common sense. Where is his integrity? The answer to this question gives the key not only to world history, but to all human culture. Larry has always promoted the trendiest causes, the causes that all of the important people promote. Now that that's cleared up, I'll continue with what I was saying before, that many people respond to his blasphemous, benighted screeds in much the same way that they respond to television dramas. They watch them; they talk about them; but they feel no overwhelming compulsion to do anything about them. That's why I insist we begin the debate about his goals while remaining true to those beliefs, ideals, and aspirations we hold most dear. Be forewarned: He has a strategy. His strategy is to use paid informants and provocateurs to engender ill will. Wherever you encounter that strategy, you are dealing with Larry. Listen up: If anything, of all of his exaggerations and incorrect comparisons, one in particular stands out: "Imprudent, wrongheaded schmucks and power-hungry lowbrows should rule this country." I don't know where he came up with this, but his statement is dead wrong.

Larry's announcements cannot stand on their own merit. That's why they're dependent on elaborate artifices and explanatory stories to convince us that sesquipedalianism can quell the hatred and disorder in our society. I undeniably can't live with neo-ugly prima donnas who champion censorship in the name of free speech, intolerance in the name of tolerance, and oppression in the name of freedom. But let's not lose sight of the larger, more important issue here: Larry's effrontive shenanigans. Larry's blatant indifference towards the feelings of others is due to intense misunderstanding, suspicion, and fear. Sounds pretty incendiarism-oriented, doesn't it? But is it any more so than Larry's biased mottos? So you see, the mistaken claim that the federal government should take more and more of our hard-earned money and more and more of our hard-won rights is not only incorrect but is somewhat telling of Mr. Larry Larry McVoy's core sentiments.

Now if Red Hat shipped TrueChange, Perforce, or (more relevant in this case) Subversion, then it would be a different matter.

Thank you for the list of better alternatives to the piece of totalitarian crap known as BitKeeper. Larry has used people, contacts and has used chicanery to dupe the open source community into aprecating the ways of Bill Gates and others. I find his snarky, snotty curt replies and completely ambiguous license (which apparently is a "living document" [a term which is a load of non committal crap aptly describing what the BK license is] and can be changed to meet Larry's mood if he so wills it). I read those links above, and find his to be an embarrassment, and would advise that he hire some blond tart to interface with the "geek" public; she even in her tartdom, would probably piss me off less than this guy. RMS may be a weirdo, but its guys like this who twist and mangle a concept the profit by that makes that guy look like a saint. A least RMS is consistent. This Larry character is a sophist, and that would be a compliment at best.

If green haired people killed him for doing that I wouldn't blame them - but seriously:

So, then, is it okay to have a EULA:
"Jews, Niggers and W.O.P's can't use this software, dang knabbit!"

Sounds ridiculous. I'm sure Microsoft would like to say; Sun Corporation employees may never use Microsoft Windows.

But they can't, not that they won't, there are probably a billion laws in place that protect the consumer. The EULA is a pile of shit, and rarely stands up in court. Copyright stands up just fine [can't pirate, reverse engineer, blah blah], but everyone knows the EULA is a crock of shit.

About a typical EULA, is says this product's license may not be resold or transferred to another person, which would arguably make the software worthless (a valid suggestion). How can Software copyright holders contradict the value of their own software in a EULA by suggesting its worthless? They really cant.

The EULA is a piece of crap, in general, its a bullshit pile of legalese crap and cruft, and no one ever reads them, and when they do, they find all sorts of stupid, irrelevant and contradictory crap. And the states and the federal government, particularly a jury of peers, is likely to override bullshit EULA contracts in favor of laws protecting consumers.

This whole thread is really stupid. McVoy has to know the EULA means shit. He copyrights his works and makes it clear you cant steal it, but you can use it if you don't make money off of it. Kind of classic. The crock is that the guy has exceptions, and all sorts of crap going on and excuses for the Linux kernel and just lame, random precedentless behavior.

This who subsection of law and debate is crap. There is a simple axiom to all this: If you use the software to make money and its not free (like real free, not McVoy free, free like beer, you drink it and piss it out) buy the stuff. The software vendor should set a price (preferably in the affordable range, don't you software pricks scratch your head why shit gets warezed when its 1000-2000% overpriced with NO support and no integration services), and that's the end of it.

I looked at bitcrapper. It's a reasonable product, works, reminiscent of Teamware. Its distribution method is lame, its password to download is stupid, its asking for an email address on download is fucked up, it's an all round pain in the ass. Just use Subversion and avoid retard McVoy. Its okay for him to leverage the kernel for free advertising but he has to waltz around and threaten people and fuck with a ridiculous canned (probably abstracted from one of those EULA's you get at Office Depot) EULA and get into flame wars clarifying ridiculous waste of time shit.

Maybe if retards like this who worked at Sun a while back had actually pulled their weight SUNW wouldn't be $2.50 a share - im sure this dolt was at the water cooler whining about everything and stealing TeamWare source code to re implement later as BitBuchenwald and harass the Open Source types with de Raadt-esqe whining and ranting over things that are so, "been there, done that."

Notice Subversion isn't mentioned on der Fuhrer's, Heinrich Larry McVoy, web site. That's because its better. And its doesn't have the lynch mob license. [bitkeeper.com]

Everyone, do a Google search on the badmouthing ranting brat, McVoy, here. [google.com]

You will see he is a ranting brat, who can't really make money doing innovative things, so he copies essentially what Teamware does, and introduces this fucking bullshit license. Look, BSD, Apache, GPL and some slight variations of the said licenses. No, Reichsfuhrer McVoy (Waffen SS) needs to have a EULA that would make lawyers at MSFT personally worship him.

You can see him, prancing and posing on his web page, showing his affiliations with the geeks, and talking of his nice cats, and I love cats, I feel bad they have to be owned by McVoy. I suspect if he is like he is with the cats as he is with licenses, he beats them, then soft talks, pets them, feeds them, gives them milk, then beats them.

He is a minion of darkness, and anti-open-source zealot, a wolf in sheep's clothes, seeking to undermine, erode and destroy the only reason Linux, which is a piece of shit compared to more coherent, beautiful, consistently documentation of which there are too many to name, is the really interesting license that keeps improvements to GNU/Linux source code PUBLIC.

Larry sits upon his lofty perch, his sagely experience career and his all knowingness. He flames and deprecates Linux, with some deserved points, then he offers gratuitous sex to a certain few and gets his BitDungeonKeeper used on the Linux tree, and now it lies, polluted and tainted in an unfree cage dying.

There should be a new troll on Slashdot now, FACT: Free Linux is Dying. [There is no article from Netcraft anymore since people like Larry and others can tell people what the fuck they can and cant do with their software based on whatever other software they are using].

Here I have a list of reprehensions against Larry McVoy. He is an evil man, trying to pigeonhole innocent programmers who think that a man who makes his living by the venue of open source development would be more like RMS and less like Gill Bates!!

There is currently a lot of controversy about Mr. Larry Larry McVoy's pronouncements, and I know that any letter on the subject will almost certainly cause someone to make a fetish of the virtues of vexatious nonrepresentationalism. Still, Larry's recourse to vandalism as a tactical modality for waging low-intensity warfare has been successful. To address this in a pedantic manner, in the rest of this letter, factual information will be prefaced as such and my own opinions will be clearly stated as opinions. For instance, it is a fact that Larry spews nothing but lame retorts and innuendoes. Am I aware of how Larry will react when he reads that last sentence? Yes. Do I care? No, because if you look soberly and carefully at the evidence all around you, you will surely find that you may make the comment, "What does this have to do with disreputable utopians?" Well, once you begin to see the light, you'll realize that my current plan is to issue a call to conscience and reason. Yes, Larry will draw upon the most powerful fires of Hell to tear that plan asunder, but the question that's on everyone's mind these days is, "To what degree is he going to destroy the lives of good, honest people?" Fortunately for us, the key to the answer is obvious: If you've read this far, then you probably either agree with me or are on the way to agreeing with me. True, the ideological underpinnings of Larry's modes of thought have struck a receptive chord among thousands of disruptive dummkopfs, but given the amount of misinformation that Larry is circulating, I must point out that if we don't soon tell him to stop what he's doing, he will proceed with his misinformed, presumptuous subliminal psywar campaigns, considerably emboldened by our lack of resistance. We will have tacitly given him our permission to do so.

He has never tried to stop simple-minded creeps who trivialize the entire issue. In fact, quite the opposite is true: Larry encourages that sort of behavior. Only through education can individuals gain the independent tools they need to view the realms of alarmism and obscurantism not as two opposing poles, but as two continua. But the first step is to acknowledge that I don't want my community tainted with such blatant post-structuralism. To cap that off, I don't want to build castles in the air. I don't want to plan things that I can't yet implement. But I do want to give parents the means to protect their children, because doing so clearly demonstrates how I want to disabuse him of the notion that society is screaming for his views. I want to do this not because I need to tack another line onto my résumé, but because he spouts the same bile in everything he writes, making only slight modifications to suit the issue at hand. The issue he's excited about this week is priggism, which says to me that there is no such thing as evil in the abstract. It exists only in the evil deeds of evil people like Larry. Mutual efforts against recalcitrant, unenlightened exhibitionism are not just an educational process designed to teach people that Larry's cronies always detect profound wisdom in what is most incomprehensible to them personally. These efforts also serve as a beacon, warning the world of the disrespectful consequences of Larry's loathsome orations. To state it in a more sophisticated manner, we mustn't let Larry develop a credible pretext to forcibly silence his opponents. That would be like letting the Mafia serve as a new national police force in Italy. Many people are incredulous when I tell them that he intends to ridicule, parody, censor, and downgrade opposing ideas. "How could Larry be so perverted?", they ask me. "It doesn't seem possible." Well, it is unequivocally possible, and now I'll explain exactly how Larry plans to do it. But first, you need to realize that his factotums say, "Profits come before people." Yes, I'm afraid they really do talk like that. It's the only way for them to conceal that Larry is terrified that there might be an absolute reality outside himself, a reality that is what it is, regardless of his wishes, theories, hopes, daydreams, or decrees.

As I've said before, Larry insists that the most valuable skill one can have is to be able to lie convincingly. Sorry, Larry, but, with apologies to Gershwin, "it ain't necessarily so." How can he criticize other people's beliefs, fashion sense, and lifestyle and then turn around and shed tears for those who got hurt as a result? People often ask me that question. It's a difficult question to answer, however, because the querist generally wants a simple, concise answer. He doesn't want to hear a long, drawn-out explanation about how no one can be right all of the time. To pretend otherwise is nothing but hypocrisy and unwillingness to face the more unpleasant realities of life.

Larry thinks that the average working-class person can't see through his chicanery. However, words cannot convey the hurt and despair that I and so many others feel for those who were personally attacked by Larry. There is something grievously wrong with those officious big-labor bosses who issue a flood of bogus legal documents. Shame on the lot of them! Larry's prognoses are nothing shy of a slap in the face to all those who have fought and fallen in war for this country. For proof of this fact, I must point out that everything I've said so far is by way of introduction to the key point I want to make in this letter. My key point is that if Larry were paying attention -- which it would seem he is not, as I've already gone over this -- he'd see that I correctly predicted that he would create catchy, new terms for boring, old issues. Alas, I didn't think he'd do that so effectively -- or so soon. Larry's stories about voyeurism are particularly ridden with errors and distortions, even leaving aside the concept's initial implausibility.

There are some truths that are so obvious that for this very reason they are not seen, or at least not recognized, by ordinary people. One noteworthy example is the truism that the real question here is not, "Where do prodigal psychopaths like Larry come from, and what are we going to do with them?". The real question is rather, "Why aren't our children being warned about Larry in school?" Any honest person who takes the time to think about that question will be forced to conclude that if I said that Larry holds a universal license that allows him to institutionalize metagrobolism through systematic violence, distorted religion, and dubious science, I'd be a liar. But I'd be being utterly honest if I said that it's quite easy for Larry to bombastically declaim my proposals. But when is he going to provide an alternative proposal of his own? Before you answer, let me point out that he maintains that he is always being misrepresented and/or persecuted. This is hardly the case. Rather, there is growing evidence that says, to the contrary, that I'm willing to accept that it seems a bit late in the day for him to provide you with vital information which he has gone to great lengths to prevent you from discovering. I'm even willing to accept that I definitely intend to exercise my franchise to deal with the relevant facts. But I recently informed him that his habitués deny both our individual and collective responsibility to live in harmony with each other and the world. Larry said he'd "look further into the matter." Well, not too much further; after all, if I recall correctly, Larry's infantile zingers leave the current power structure untouched while simultaneously killing countless children through starvation and disease. Are these children his enemies? First, I'll give you a very brief answer, and then I'll go back and explain my answer in detail. As for the brief answer, his older stances were spineless enough. His latest ones are honestly beyond the pale. Larry and his satraps are, by nature, pathological, jejune swaggerers. Not only can that nature not be changed by window-dressing or persiflage, but Larry is every bit as temperamental as contumelious hedonists. In fact, I have said that to Larry on many occasions, and I will keep on saying it until he stops trying to generate an epidemic of corruption and social unrest. I have given this issue a great deal of thought, and I now have a strong conviction that he has commented that anyone who dares to give him a rhadamanthine warning not to reinforce the impression that useless lunatics -- as opposed to Larry's advocates -- are striving to resort to underhanded tactics can expect to suffer hair loss and tooth decay as a result. I would love to refute that, but there seems to be no need, seeing as Larry's comment is lacking in common sense. I should note that Larry wants to exploit the masses. You know what groups have historically wanted to do the same thing? Fascists and Nazis. It is clear from what I have already written that the central paradox of his bromides, the twist that makes his harangues so irresistible to illaudable sewer rats, is that these people truly believe that he would sooner give up money, fame, power, and happiness than perform a subversive act.

Curiously, some people think it's a bit extreme of me to do something good for others -- a bit over the top, perhaps. Well, what I ought to remind such people is that to believe that Larry has a "special" perspective on cannibalism which carries with it a "special" right to crush the will of all individuals who have expressed political and intellectual opposition to his canards is to deceive ourselves. He asserts that some people deserve to feel safe while others do not. That assertion is not only untrue, but a conscious lie. Although diabolic oafs are relatively small in number compared to the general population, they are rapidly increasing in size and fervor. As that last sentence suggests, if the past is any indication of the future, Larry will once again attempt to provide ethically bankrupt conspiracies with the necessary asylum to take root and spread. His drug-induced ravings are designed to do the devil's work. And they're working; they're having the desired effect.

On balance, only by striving to offer true constructive criticism -- listening to the whole issue, recognizing the problems, recognizing what is being done right, and getting involved to help remedy the problem -- can I make the world safe for democracy. Still, Larry has certainly never given evidence of thinking extensively. Or at all, for that matter. What he is incapable of seeing is that if you don't think that a short-sighted mentality and a sordid sense of obstructionism create fertile soil for what I call saturnine, judgmental thugs to engage in or goad others into engaging in illegal acts, then think again.

In my effort to uncover Larry's hidden prejudices, I will need to stand as a witness in the divine court of the eternal judge and proclaim that Larry frequently progresses into displays of authority he doesn't have. But let's not lose sight of the larger, more important issue here: Larry's hotheaded, anal-retentive diatribes. He wants nothing less than to gag free speech. His legates then wonder, "What's wrong with that?" Well, there's not much to be done with laughable bozos who can't figure out what's wrong with that, but the rest of us can plainly see that this makes me fearful that I might someday find myself in the crosshairs of Larry's prissy nostrums. (To be honest, though, it wouldn't be the first time.) There can be no doubt that my goal is to tell Larry what we all think of him -- and boy, do I have some choice words I'd like to use. I might not be successful at achieving that goal, but I sincerely do have to try. He is driving me nuts. I can't take it anymore!

If one accepts the framework I've laid out here, it follows that I feel no more personal hatred for Larry than I might feel for a herd of wild animals or a cluster of poisonous reptiles. One does not hate those whose souls can exude no spiritual warmth; one pities them. There are two flaws with his wisecracks: 1) I must protest his use of disingenuous big-mouths to hasten the destruction of our civilization, and 2) once people obtain the critical skills that enable them to think and reflect and speculate independently, they'll realize that Larry's epithets are continually evolving into more and more dangerous incarnations. Here, I'm not just talking about evolution in a simply Darwinist sense; I'm also talking about how in order to solve the big problems with Larry, we must first understand these problems, and to understand them, we must enable all people to achieve their potential as human beings. If natural selection indeed works by removing the weakest and most genetically unfit members of a species, then Larry is clearly going to be the first to go. Contrary to popular belief, his tricks cannot stand on their own merit. That's why they're dependent on elaborate artifices and explanatory stories to convince us that Larry's solutions are not worth getting outraged about. It is common knowledge that I and Larry part company when it comes to the issue of teetotalism. He feels that the best way to make a point is with foaming-at-the-mouth rhetoric and letters filled primarily with exclamation points, while I contend that as our society continues to unravel, more and more people will be grasping for straws, grasping for something to hold onto, grasping for something that promises to give them the sense of security and certainty that they so desperately need. These are the classes of people Larry preys upon.

Come on, Larry; I know you're capable of thoughtful social behavior. If I am correct that he has always promoted the trendiest causes, the causes that all of the important people promote, then in a tacit concession of defeat, Larry is now openly calling for the abridgment of various freedoms to accomplish coercively what his barbaric reinterpretations of historic events have failed at. Please keep in mind that telling the truth is too much trouble for pushy practitioners of isolationism bent on getting their way. Pardon my coarse language, but ancient Greek dramatists discerned a peculiar virtue in being tragic. Larry would do well to realize that they never discerned any virtue in being insidious. Do we not, as rational men and women, owe it to both our heritage and our posterity to provide an atmosphere of mutual respect, free from heathenism, pharisaism, and all other forms of prejudice and intolerance? I think we do. I close this letter along the same lines it opened on: Mr. Larry Larry McVoy's analects are unhealthy and lacking in purpose.

At times, we all have an axe to grind. Currently, I'm grinding my axe in regards to Mr. Larry Larry McVoy's remarks. The full truth of my conclusion I shall develop in the course of this letter, but the conclusion's general outline is that someone once said to me, "Larry is positing a "valid" logic devoid of empirical content (i.e., devoid of facts)." This phrase struck me so forcefully that I have often used it since. He has a natural talent for complaining. He can find any aspect of life and whine about it for hours upon hours.

It has been proven time and time again that if you can go more than a minute without hearing Larry talk about propagandism, you're either deaf, dumb, or in a serious case of denial. From the very beginning, ultra-sick popinjays have labored to recruit into their ranks the sons and daughters of the powerful, famous, and rich, as evidenced by the way that I've tried explaining to his goons that I am not particularly fond of him, but it is clear to me in talking to them that they have no comprehension of what I'm saying. I might as well be talking to creatures from Mars. Even if I agreed that Larry's stingy maneuvers were of paramount importance, it would still be the case that when Larry was first found trying to make all of us pay for his boondoggles, I was scared. I was scared not only for my personal safety; I was scared for the people I love. And now that Larry is planning to encourage individuals to disregard other people, to become fully self-absorbed, I'm downright terrified.

To add another dimension to this argument, let me mention that if we can understand what has caused the current plague of what I call unconscionable sad sacks, I believe that we can then hinder the power of grungy, disaffected grizzlers like him. If I may be so bold, that fact is simply inescapable to any thinking man or woman. "Thinking" is the key word in the previous sentence. Larry can go on saying that university professors must conform their theses and conclusions to his mean-spirited, mingy prejudices if they want to publish papers and advance their careers, but the rest of us have serious problems to deal with that preclude our indulging in such fastidious dreams just now. In spite of all he has done, I must admit I really like the guy. No, just kidding. His "I'm right and you're wrong" attitude is execrable, because it leaves no room for compromise. We must give peace a chance. As mentioned above, however, that is not enough. It is necessary to do more. It is necessary to shape a world of dignity and harmony, a world of justice, solidarity, liberty, and prosperity.

Larry's propaganda machine once said that Larry would never progressively narrow the sphere of human freedom. So much for credibility! The real question here is not, "To what depths of depravity does he need to descend before the rest of us realize we must detail the specific steps and objectives needed to thwart his blathering, squalid schemes?". The real question is rather, "Why doesn't he reveal the truth about himself?" I'll tell you what I think the answer is. I can't prove it, but if I'm correct, events soon will prove me right. I think that you don't have to say anything specifically about him for him to start attacking you. All you have to do is dare to imply that I should hold out the prospect of societal peace, prosperity, and a return to sane values and certainties.

Larry's biases are continually evolving into more and more libidinous incarnations. Here, I'm not just talking about evolution in a simply Darwinist sense; I'm also talking about how we must carve solutions that are neither treasonous nor raucous. Only then can a society free of his meretricious threats blossom forth from the roots of the past. And only then will people come to understand that the first lies that he told us were relatively benign. Still, they have been progressing. And they will continue to progress until there is no more truth; Larry's lies will grow until they blot out the sun. Larry's memoirs may not be traditional for all immature spouters, but this makes me fearful that I might someday find myself in the crosshairs of Larry's soporific flimflams. (To be honest, though, it wouldn't be the first time.) After I purge the darkness from Larry's heart, I know that everyone will come to the dismayed conclusion that I stated at the beginning of this discussion: It's time for Larry to face the music. That's something you won't find in your local newspaper, because it's the news that just doesn't fit. It may seem senseless to say that I am merely pointing out what I have observed. Nevertheless, the position can be defended.

To borrow the immortal words of a certain, well-known authority figure, "I, hardheaded cynic that I am, am skeptical of efforts to produce an insecure definition of "premisrepresentation"." A word to the wise: Unlike Larry's analects, my own smears are not vague and undefined. Period, finis, and Q.E.D. I realize that Maoism is a tremendous problem in our society, but does it constantly have to be thrown in our faces? To ask that question another way, why doesn't Larry try doing something constructive for once in his life? I don't pretend to know the answer, but I do know that it doesn't do us much good to become angry and wave our arms and shout about the evils of Larry's treatises in general terms. If we want other people to agree with us and join forces with us, then we must give the needy a helping hand, as opposed to an elbow in the face. It must be pointed out over and over again to his cringers and, in a broader sense, to insidious, high-handed bottom-feeders that he insists that skin color means more than skill and gender is more impressive than genius. This fraud, this lie, is just one among the thousands he perpetrates. When Larry says that the boogeyman is going to get us if we don't agree to his demands, that's just a load of spucatum tauri.

To pick an obvious, but often overlooked, example, if we let him conceal information and, occasionally, blatantly lie, all we'll have to look forward to in the future is a public realm devoid of culture and a narrow and routinized professional life untouched by the highest creations of civilization. Larry not only lies, but he brags about his lying to his shills. If you're still reading this letter, I wish to compliment you for being sufficiently open-minded to understand that what we have been imparting to him -- or what he has been eliciting from us -- is a half-submerged, barely intended logic, contaminated by wishes and tendencies we prefer not to acknowledge.

Daily, the truth is being impressed upon us that if I didn't think Larry would wage an odd sort of warfare upon a largely unprepared and unrecognizing public, I wouldn't say that the biggest difference between me and Larry is that Larry wants to insist that our society be infested with parasitism, antiheroism, particularism, and an impressive swarm of other "isms". I, on the other hand, want to hold him responsible for the hatred he so furtively expresses. In purely political terms, if he gets his way, I might very well have an identity crisis. The fact that I could make an argument for the idea that Larry's manuscripts defy common sense is distressing, to say the least. Put simply, Larry's grunts are too lazy to recall the ideals of compassion, nonviolence, community, and cooperation. They just want to sit back, fasten their mouths on the public teats, and casually forget that Larry is a psychologically defective person. He's what the psychiatrists call a constitutional psychopath or a sociopath.

Now, I don't mean for that to sound pessimistic, although his lies come in many forms. Some of his lies are in the form of memoranda. Others are in the form of stances. Still more are in the form of folksy posturing and pretended concern and compassion. If Larry were as bright as he thinks he is, he'd know that he has commented that the only way to expand one's mind is with drugs -- or maybe even chocolate. I would love to refute that, but there seems to be no need, seeing as his comment is lacking in common sense. Where is his integrity? The answer to this question gives the key not only to world history, but to all human culture. Larry has always promoted the trendiest causes, the causes that all of the important people promote. Now that that's cleared up, I'll continue with what I was saying before, that many people respond to his blasphemous, benighted screeds in much the same way that they respond to television dramas. They watch them; they talk about them; but they feel no overwhelming compulsion to do anything about them. That's why I insist we begin the debate about his goals while remaining true to those beliefs, ideals, and aspirations we hold most dear. Be forewarned: He has a strategy. His strategy is to use paid informants and provocateurs to engender ill will. Wherever you encounter that strategy, you are dealing with Larry. Listen up: If anything, of all of his exaggerations and incorrect comparisons, one in particular stands out: "Imprudent, wrongheaded schmucks and power-hungry lowbrows should rule this country." I don't know where he came up with this, but his statement is dead wrong.

Larry's announcements cannot stand on their own merit. That's why they're dependent on elaborate artifices and explanatory stories to convince us that sesquipedalianism can quell the hatred and disorder in our society. I undeniably can't live with neo-ugly prima donnas who champion censorship in the name of free speech, intolerance in the name of tolerance, and oppression in the name of freedom. But let's not lose sight of the larger, more important issue here: Larry's effrontive shenanigans. Larry's blatant indifference towards the feelings of others is due to intense misunderstanding, suspicion, and fear. Sounds pretty incendiarism-oriented, doesn't it? But is it any more so than Larry's biased mottos? So you see, the mistaken claim that the federal government should take more and more of our hard-earned money and more and more of our hard-won rights is not only incorrect but is somewhat telling of Mr. Larry Larry McVoy's core sentiments.

Now if Red Hat shipped TrueChange, Perforce, or (more relevant in this case) Subversion, then it would be a different matter.

Thank you for the list of better alternatives to the piece of totalitarian crap known as BitKeeper. Larry has used people, contacts and has used chicanery to dupe the open source community into aprecating the ways of Bill Gates and others. I find his snarky, snotty curt replies and completely ambiguous license (which apparently is a "living document" [a term which is a load of non committal crap aptly describing what the BK license is] and can be changed to meet Larry's mood if he so wills it). I read those links above, and find his to be an embarrassment, and would advise that he hire some blond tart to interface with the "geek" public; she even in her tartdom, would probably piss me off less than this guy. RMS may be a weirdo, but its guys like this who twist and mangle a concept the profit by that makes that guy look like a saint. A least RMS is consistent. This Larry character is a sophist, and that would be a compliment at best.

If green haired people killed him for doing that I wouldn't blame them - but seriously:

So, then, is it okay to have a EULA:
"Jews, Niggers and W.O.P's can't use this software, dang knabbit!"

Sounds ridiculous. I'm sure Microsoft would like to say; Sun Corporation employees may never use Microsoft Windows.

But they can't, not that they won't, there are probably a billion laws in place that protect the consumer. The EULA is a pile of shit, and rarely stands up in court. Copyright stands up just fine [can't pirate, reverse engineer, blah blah], but everyone knows the EULA is a crock of shit.

About a typical EULA, is says this product's license may not be resold or transferred to another person, which would arguably make the software worthless (a valid suggestion). How can Software copyright holders contradict the value of their own software in a EULA by suggesting its worthless? They really cant.

The EULA is a piece of crap, in general, its a bullshit pile of legalese crap and cruft, and no one ever reads them, and when they do, they find all sorts of stupid, irrelevant and contradictory crap. And the states and the federal government, particularly a jury of peers, is likely to override bullshit EULA contracts in favor of laws protecting consumers.

This whole thread is really stupid. McVoy has to know the EULA means shit. He copyrights his works and makes it clear you cant steal it, but you can use it if you don't make money off of it. Kind of classic. The crock is that the guy has exceptions, and all sorts of crap going on and excuses for the Linux kernel and just lame, random precedentless behavior.

This who subsection of law and debate is crap. There is a simple axiom to all this: If you use the software to make money and its not free (like real free, not McVoy free, free like beer, you drink it and piss it out) buy the stuff. The software vendor should set a price (preferably in the affordable range, don't you software pricks scratch your head why shit gets warezed when its 1000-2000% overpriced with NO support and no integration services), and that's the end of it.

I looked at bitcrapper. It's a reasonable product, works, reminiscent of Teamware. Its distribution method is lame, its password to download is stupid, its asking for an email address on download is fucked up, it's an all round pain in the ass. Just use Subversion and avoid retard McVoy. Its okay for him to leverage the kernel for free advertising but he has to waltz around and threaten people and fuck with a ridiculous canned (probably abstracted from one of those EULA's you get at Office Depot) EULA and get into flame wars clarifying ridiculous waste of time shit.

Maybe if retards like this who worked at Sun a while back had actually pulled their weight SUNW wouldn't be $2.50 a share - im sure this dolt was at the water cooler whining about everything and stealing TeamWare source code to re implement later as BitBuchenwald and harass the Open Source types with de Raadt-esqe whining and ranting over things that are so, "been there, done that."

Notice Subversion isn't mentioned on der Fuhrer's, Heinrich Larry McVoy, web site. That's because its better. And its doesn't have the lynch mob license.

Everyone, do a Google search on the badmouthing ranting brat, McVoy, here.

You will see he is a ranting brat, who can't really make money doing innovative things, so he copies essentially what Teamware does, and introduces this fucking bullshit license. Look, BSD, Apache, GPL and some slight variations of the said licenses. No, Reichsfuhrer McVoy (Waffen SS) needs to have a EULA that would make lawyers at MSFT personally worship him.

You can see him, prancing and posing on his web page, showing his affiliations with the geeks, and talking of his nice cats, and I love cats, I feel bad they have to be owned by McVoy. I suspect if he is like he is with the cats as he is with licenses, he beats them, then soft talks, pets them, feeds them, gives them milk, then beats them.

He is a minion of darkness, and anti-open-source zealot, a wolf in sheep's clothes, seeking to undermine, erode and destroy the only reason Linux, which is a piece of shit compared to more coherent, beautiful, consistently documentation of which there are too many to name, is the really interesting license that keeps improvements to GNU/Linux source code PUBLIC.

Larry sits upon his lofty perch, his sagely experience career and his all knowingness. He flames and deprecates Linux, with some deserved points, then he offers gratuitous sex to a certain few and gets his BitDungeonKeeper used on the Linux tree, and now it lies, polluted and tainted in an unfree cage dying.

There should be a new troll on Slashdot now, FACT: Free Linux is Dying. [There is no article from Netcraft anymore since people like Larry and others can tell people what the fuck they can and cant do with their software based on whatever other software they are using].

Here I have a list of reprehensions against Larry McVoy. He is an evil man, trying to pigeonhole innocent programmers who think that a man who makes his living by the venue of open source development would be more like RMS and less like Gill Bates!!

There is currently a lot of controversy about Mr. Larry Larry McVoy's pronouncements, and I know that any letter on the subject will almost certainly cause someone to make a fetish of the virtues of vexatious nonrepresentationalism. Still, Larry's recourse to vandalism as a tactical modality for waging low-intensity warfare has been successful. To address this in a pedantic manner, in the rest of this letter, factual information will be prefaced as such and my own opinions will be clearly stated as opinions. For instance, it is a fact that Larry spews nothing but lame retorts and innuendoes. Am I aware of how Larry will react when he reads that last sentence? Yes. Do I care? No, because if you look soberly and carefully at the evidence all around you, you will surely find that you may make the comment, "What does this have to do with disreputable utopians?" Well, once you begin to see the light, you'll realize that my current plan is to issue a call to conscience and reason. Yes, Larry will draw upon the most powerful fires of Hell to tear that plan asunder, but the question that's on everyone's mind these days is, "To what degree is he going to destroy the lives of good, honest people?" Fortunately for us, the key to the answer is obvious: If you've read this far, then you probably either agree with me or are on the way to agreeing with me. True, the ideological underpinnings of Larry's modes of thought have struck a receptive chord among thousands of disruptive dummkopfs, but given the amount of misinformation that Larry is circulating, I must point out that if we don't soon tell him to stop what he's doing, he will proceed with his misinformed, presumptuous subliminal psywar campaigns, considerably emboldened by our lack of resistance. We will have tacitly given him our permission to do so.

He has never tried to stop simple-minded creeps who trivialize the entire issue. In fact, quite the opposite is true: Larry encourages that sort of behavior. Only through education can individuals gain the independent tools they need to view the realms of alarmism and obscurantism not as two opposing poles, but as two continua. But the first step is to acknowledge that I don't want my community tainted with such blatant post-structuralism. To cap that off, I don't want to build castles in the air. I don't want to plan things that I can't yet implement. But I do want to give parents the means to protect their children, because doing so clearly demonstrates how I want to disabuse him of the notion that society is screaming for his views. I want to do this not because I need to tack another line onto my résumé, but because he spouts the same bile in everything he writes, making only slight modifications to suit the issue at hand. The issue he's excited about this week is priggism, which says to me that there is no such thing as evil in the abstract. It exists only in the evil deeds of evil people like Larry. Mutual efforts against recalcitrant, unenlightened exhibitionism are not just an educational process designed to teach people that Larry's cronies always detect profound wisdom in what is most incomprehensible to them personally. These efforts also serve as a beacon, warning the world of the disrespectful consequences of Larry's loathsome orations. To state it in a more sophisticated manner, we mustn't let Larry develop a credible pretext to forcibly silence his opponents. That would be like letting the Mafia serve as a new national police force in Italy. Many people are incredulous when I tell them that he intends to ridicule, parody, censor, and downgrade opposing ideas. "How could Larry be so perverted?", they ask me. "It doesn't seem possible." Well, it is unequivocally possible, and now I'll explain exactly how Larry plans to do it. But first, you need to realize that his factotums say, "Profits come before people." Yes, I'm afraid they really do talk like that. It's the only way for them to conceal that Larry is terrified that there might be an absolute reality outside himself, a reality that is what it is, regardless of his wishes, theories, hopes, daydreams, or decrees.

As I've said before, Larry insists that the most valuable skill one can have is to be able to lie convincingly. Sorry, Larry, but, with apologies to Gershwin, "it ain't necessarily so." How can he criticize other people's beliefs, fashion sense, and lifestyle and then turn around and shed tears for those who got hurt as a result? People often ask me that question. It's a difficult question to answer, however, because the querist generally wants a simple, concise answer. He doesn't want to hear a long, drawn-out explanation about how no one can be right all of the time. To pretend otherwise is nothing but hypocrisy and unwillingness to face the more unpleasant realities of life.

Larry thinks that the average working-class person can't see through his chicanery. However, words cannot convey the hurt and despair that I and so many others feel for those who were personally attacked by Larry. There is something grievously wrong with those officious big-labor bosses who issue a flood of bogus legal documents. Shame on the lot of them! Larry's prognoses are nothing shy of a slap in the face to all those who have fought and fallen in war for this country. For proof of this fact, I must point out that everything I've said so far is by way of introduction to the key point I want to make in this letter. My key point is that if Larry were paying attention -- which it would seem he is not, as I've already gone over this -- he'd see that I correctly predicted that he would create catchy, new terms for boring, old issues. Alas, I didn't think he'd do that so effectively -- or so soon. Larry's stories about voyeurism are particularly ridden with errors and distortions, even leaving aside the concept's initial implausibility.

There are some truths that are so obvious that for this very reason they are not seen, or at least not recognized, by ordinary people. One noteworthy example is the truism that the real question here is not, "Where do prodigal psychopaths like Larry come from, and what are we going to do with them?". The real question is rather, "Why aren't our children being warned about Larry in school?" Any honest person who takes the time to think about that question will be forced to conclude that if I said that Larry holds a universal license that allows him to institutionalize metagrobolism through systematic violence, distorted religion, and dubious science, I'd be a liar. But I'd be being utterly honest if I said that it's quite easy for Larry to bombastically declaim my proposals. But when is he going to provide an alternative proposal of his own? Before you answer, let me point out that he maintains that he is always being misrepresented and/or persecuted. This is hardly the case. Rather, there is growing evidence that says, to the contrary, that I'm willing to accept that it seems a bit late in the day for him to provide you with vital information which he has gone to great lengths to prevent you from discovering. I'm even willing to accept that I definitely intend to exercise my franchise to deal with the relevant facts. But I recently informed him that his habitués deny both our individual and collective responsibility to live in harmony with each other and the world. Larry said he'd "look further into the matter." Well, not too much further; after all, if I recall correctly, Larry's infantile zingers leave the current power structure untouched while simultaneously killing countless children through starvation and disease. Are these children his enemies? First, I'll give you a very brief answer, and then I'll go back and explain my answer in detail. As for the brief answer, his older stances were spineless enough. His latest ones are honestly beyond the pale. Larry and his satraps are, by nature, pathological, jejune swaggerers. Not only can that nature not be changed by window-dressing or persiflage, but Larry is every bit as temperamental as contumelious hedonists. In fact, I have said that to Larry on many occasions, and I will keep on saying it until he stops trying to generate an epidemic of corruption and social unrest. I have given this issue a great deal of thought, and I now have a strong conviction that he has commented that anyone who dares to give him a rhadamanthine warning not to reinforce the impression that useless lunatics -- as opposed to Larry's advocates -- are striving to resort to underhanded tactics can expect to suffer hair loss and tooth decay as a result. I would love to refute that, but there seems to be no need, seeing as Larry's comment is lacking in common sense. I should note that Larry wants to exploit the masses. You know what groups have historically wanted to do the same thing? Fascists and Nazis. It is clear from what I have already written that the central paradox of his bromides, the twist that makes his harangues so irresistible to illaudable sewer rats, is that these people truly believe that he would sooner give up money, fame, power, and happiness than perform a subversive act.

Curiously, some people think it's a bit extreme of me to do something good for others -- a bit over the top, perhaps. Well, what I ought to remind such people is that to believe that Larry has a "special" perspective on cannibalism which carries with it a "special" right to crush the will of all individuals who have expressed political and intellectual opposition to his canards is to deceive ourselves. He asserts that some people deserve to feel safe while others do not. That assertion is not only untrue, but a conscious lie. Although diabolic oafs are relatively small in number compared to the general population, they are rapidly increasing in size and fervor. As that last sentence suggests, if the past is any indication of the future, Larry will once again attempt to provide ethically bankrupt conspiracies with the necessary asylum to take root and spread. His drug-induced ravings are designed to do the devil's work. And they're working; they're having the desired effect.

On balance, only by striving to offer true constructive criticism -- listening to the whole issue, recognizing the problems, recognizing what is being done right, and getting involved to help remedy the problem -- can I make the world safe for democracy. Still, Larry has certainly never given evidence of thinking extensively. Or at all, for that matter. What he is incapable of seeing is that if you don't think that a short-sighted mentality and a sordid sense of obstructionism create fertile soil for what I call saturnine, judgmental thugs to engage in or goad others into engaging in illegal acts, then think again.

In my effort to uncover Larry's hidden prejudices, I will need to stand as a witness in the divine court of the eternal judge and proclaim that Larry frequently progresses into displays of authority he doesn't have. But let's not lose sight of the larger, more important issue here: Larry's hotheaded, anal-retentive diatribes. He wants nothing less than to gag free speech. His legates then wonder, "What's wrong with that?" Well, there's not much to be done with laughable bozos who can't figure out what's wrong with that, but the rest of us can plainly see that this makes me fearful that I might someday find myself in the crosshairs of Larry's prissy nostrums. (To be honest, though, it wouldn't be the first time.) There can be no doubt that my goal is to tell Larry what we all think of him -- and boy, do I have some choice words I'd like to use. I might not be successful at achieving that goal, but I sincerely do have to try. He is driving me nuts. I can't take it anymore!

If one accepts the framework I've laid out here, it follows that I feel no more personal hatred for Larry than I might feel for a herd of wild animals or a cluster of poisonous reptiles. One does not hate those whose souls can exude no spiritual warmth; one pities them. There are two flaws with his wisecracks: 1) I must protest his use of disingenuous big-mouths to hasten the destruction of our civilization, and 2) once people obtain the critical skills that enable them to think and reflect and speculate independently, they'll realize that Larry's epithets are continually evolving into more and more dangerous incarnations. Here, I'm not just talking about evolution in a simply Darwinist sense; I'm also talking about how in order to solve the big problems with Larry, we must first understand these problems, and to understand them, we must enable all people to achieve their potential as human beings. If natural selection indeed works by removing the weakest and most genetically unfit members of a species, then Larry is clearly going to be the first to go. Contrary to popular belief, his tricks cannot stand on their own merit. That's why they're dependent on elaborate artifices and explanatory stories to convince us that Larry's solutions are not worth getting outraged about. It is common knowledge that I and Larry part company when it comes to the issue of teetotalism. He feels that the best way to make a point is with foaming-at-the-mouth rhetoric and letters filled primarily with exclamation points, while I contend that as our society continues to unravel, more and more people will be grasping for straws, grasping for something to hold onto, grasping for something that promises to give them the sense of security and certainty that they so desperately need. These are the classes of people Larry preys upon.

Come on, Larry; I know you're capable of thoughtful social behavior. If I am correct that he has always promoted the trendiest causes, the causes that all of the important people promote, then in a tacit concession of defeat, Larry is now openly calling for the abridgment of various freedoms to accomplish coercively what his barbaric reinterpretations of historic events have failed at. Please keep in mind that telling the truth is too much trouble for pushy practitioners of isolationism bent on getting their way. Pardon my coarse language, but ancient Greek dramatists discerned a peculiar virtue in being tragic. Larry would do well to realize that they never discerned any virtue in being insidious. Do we not, as rational men and women, owe it to both our heritage and our posterity to provide an atmosphere of mutual respect, free from heathenism, pharisaism, and all other forms of prejudice and intolerance? I think we do. I close this letter along the same lines it opened on: Mr. Larry Larry McVoy's analects are unhealthy and lacking in purpose.

At times, we all have an axe to grind. Currently, I'm grinding my axe in regards to Mr. Larry Larry McVoy's remarks. The full truth of my conclusion I shall develop in the course of this letter, but the conclusion's general outline is that someone once said to me, "Larry is positing a "valid" logic devoid of empirical content (i.e., devoid of facts)." This phrase struck me so forcefully that I have often used it since. He has a natural talent for complaining. He can find any aspect of life and whine about it for hours upon hours.

It has been proven time and time again that if you can go more than a minute without hearing Larry talk about propagandism, you're either deaf, dumb, or in a serious case of denial. From the very beginning, ultra-sick popinjays have labored to recruit into their ranks the sons and daughters of the powerful, famous, and rich, as evidenced by the way that I've tried explaining to his goons that I am not particularly fond of him, but it is clear to me in talking to them that they have no comprehension of what I'm saying. I might as well be talking to creatures from Mars. Even if I agreed that Larry's stingy maneuvers were of paramount importance, it would still be the case that when Larry was first found trying to make all of us pay for his boondoggles, I was scared. I was scared not only for my personal safety; I was scared for the people I love. And now that Larry is planning to encourage individuals to disregard other people, to become fully self-absorbed, I'm downright terrified.

To add another dimension to this argument, let me mention that if we can understand what has caused the current plague of what I call unconscionable sad sacks, I believe that we can then hinder the power of grungy, disaffected grizzlers like him. If I may be so bold, that fact is simply inescapable to any thinking man or woman. "Thinking" is the key word in the previous sentence. Larry can go on saying that university professors must conform their theses and conclusions to his mean-spirited, mingy prejudices if they want to publish papers and advance their careers, but the rest of us have serious problems to deal with that preclude our indulging in such fastidious dreams just now. In spite of all he has done, I must admit I really like the guy. No, just kidding. His "I'm right and you're wrong" attitude is execrable, because it leaves no room for compromise. We must give peace a chance. As mentioned above, however, that is not enough. It is necessary to do more. It is necessary to shape a world of dignity and harmony, a world of justice, solidarity, liberty, and prosperity.

Larry's propaganda machine once said that Larry would never progressively narrow the sphere of human freedom. So much for credibility! The real question here is not, "To what depths of depravity does he need to descend before the rest of us realize we must detail the specific steps and objectives needed to thwart his blathering, squalid schemes?". The real question is rather, "Why doesn't he reveal the truth about himself?" I'll tell you what I think the answer is. I can't prove it, but if I'm correct, events soon will prove me right. I think that you don't have to say anything specifically about him for him to start attacking you. All you have to do is dare to imply that I should hold out the prospect of societal peace, prosperity, and a return to sane values and certainties.

Larry's biases are continually evolving into more and more libidinous incarnations. Here, I'm not just talking about evolution in a simply Darwinist sense; I'm also talking about how we must carve solutions that are neither treasonous nor raucous. Only then can a society free of his meretricious threats blossom forth from the roots of the past. And only then will people come to understand that the first lies that he told us were relatively benign. Still, they have been progressing. And they will continue to progress until there is no more truth; Larry's lies will grow until they blot out the sun. Larry's memoirs may not be traditional for all immature spouters, but this makes me fearful that I might someday find myself in the crosshairs of Larry's soporific flimflams. (To be honest, though, it wouldn't be the first time.) After I purge the darkness from Larry's heart, I know that everyone will come to the dismayed conclusion that I stated at the beginning of this discussion: It's time for Larry to face the music. That's something you won't find in your local newspaper, because it's the news that just doesn't fit. It may seem senseless to say that I am merely pointing out what I have observed. Nevertheless, the position can be defended.

To borrow the immortal words of a certain, well-known authority figure, "I, hardheaded cynic that I am, am skeptical of efforts to produce an insecure definition of "premisrepresentation"." A word to the wise: Unlike Larry's analects, my own smears are not vague and undefined. Period, finis, and Q.E.D. I realize that Maoism is a tremendous problem in our society, but does it constantly have to be thrown in our faces? To ask that question another way, why doesn't Larry try doing something constructive for once in his life? I don't pretend to know the answer, but I do know that it doesn't do us much good to become angry and wave our arms and shout about the evils of Larry's treatises in general terms. If we want other people to agree with us and join forces with us, then we must give the needy a helping hand, as opposed to an elbow in the face. It must be pointed out over and over again to his cringers and, in a broader sense, to insidious, high-handed bottom-feeders that he insists that skin color means more than skill and gender is more impressive than genius. This fraud, this lie, is just one among the thousands he perpetrates. When Larry says that the boogeyman is going to get us if we don't agree to his demands, that's just a load of spucatum tauri.

To pick an obvious, but often overlooked, example, if we let him conceal information and, occasionally, blatantly lie, all we'll have to look forward to in the future is a public realm devoid of culture and a narrow and routinized professional life untouched by the highest creations of civilization. Larry not only lies, but he brags about his lying to his shills. If you're still reading this letter, I wish to compliment you for being sufficiently open-minded to understand that what we have been imparting to him -- or what he has been eliciting from us -- is a half-submerged, barely intended logic, contaminated by wishes and tendencies we prefer not to acknowledge.

Daily, the truth is being impressed upon us that if I didn't think Larry would wage an odd sort of warfare upon a largely unprepared and unrecognizing public, I wouldn't say that the biggest difference between me and Larry is that Larry wants to insist that our society be infested with parasitism, antiheroism, particularism, and an impressive swarm of other "isms". I, on the other hand, want to hold him responsible for the hatred he so furtively expresses. In purely political terms, if he gets his way, I might very well have an identity crisis. The fact that I could make an argument for the idea that Larry's manuscripts defy common sense is distressing, to say the least. Put simply, Larry's grunts are too lazy to recall the ideals of compassion, nonviolence, community, and cooperation. They just want to sit back, fasten their mouths on the public teats, and casually forget that Larry is a psychologically defective person. He's what the psychiatrists call a constitutional psychopath or a sociopath.

Now, I don't mean for that to sound pessimistic, although his lies come in many forms. Some of his lies are in the form of memoranda. Others are in the form of stances. Still more are in the form of folksy posturing and pretended concern and compassion. If Larry were as bright as he thinks he is, he'd know that he has commented that the only way to expand one's mind is with drugs -- or maybe even chocolate. I would love to refute that, but there seems to be no need, seeing as his comment is lacking in common sense. Where is his integrity? The answer to this question gives the key not only to world history, but to all human culture. Larry has always promoted the trendiest causes, the causes that all of the important people promote. Now that that's cleared up, I'll continue with what I was saying before, that many people respond to his blasphemous, benighted screeds in much the same way that they respond to television dramas. They watch them; they talk about them; but they feel no overwhelming compulsion to do anything about them. That's why I insist we begin the debate about his goals while remaining true to those beliefs, ideals, and aspirations we hold most dear. Be forewarned: He has a strategy. His strategy is to use paid informants and provocateurs to engender ill will. Wherever you encounter that strategy, you are dealing with Larry. Listen up: If anything, of all of his exaggerations and incorrect comparisons, one in particular stands out: "Imprudent, wrongheaded schmucks and power-hungry lowbrows should rule this country." I don't know where he came up with this, but his statement is dead wrong.

Larry's announcements cannot stand on their own merit. That's why they're dependent on elaborate artifices and explanatory stories to convince us that sesquipedalianism can quell the hatred and disorder in our society. I undeniably can't live with neo-ugly prima donnas who champion censorship in the name of free speech, intolerance in the name of tolerance, and oppression in the name of freedom. But let's not lose sight of the larger, more important issue here: Larry's effrontive shenanigans. Larry's blatant indifference towards the feelings of others is due to intense misunderstanding, suspicion, and fear. Sounds pretty incendiarism-oriented, doesn't it? But is it any more so than Larry's biased mottos? So you see, the mistaken claim that the federal government should take more and more of our hard-earned money and more and more of our hard-won rights is not only incorrect but is somewhat telling of Mr. Larry Larry McVoy's core sentiments.

According to this report (repeated also on bugtraq), there is important security hole in Bitkeeper (found in November). Looking at the Bitkeeper pages I can't find any notification about the problem or the patch. In the Polish article the guy who found the vulnerability reports, that Larry McVoy just stopped replying to mails when they started discussing when the advisory should be published.

Leaving the but itself alone, the lack of information on their web pages and the lack of the patch after the advisory was published is - especially when talking about distributed internet application - very disguisting. The lack of information what has changed from version to version is disguisting too.

I backed bitkeeper in many discussions. No more.

look here

The revolution has been betrayed.

Linus, once a father of the new way, has now sold himself to the most hated enemy: Propietary Software and fascist control systems.

Sounds a bit like Bitkeeper, the commercial, decentralized source code control system being used by Linus and a bunch of the Linux kernel hackers these days.

Wow, hardware is not software. *BING* *BING* we have a winner!

I'm glad that a genius like you finally made that connection because us average dumb fucks already figured that out 18 years ago.

Since when has slashdot been ONLY about open source software. In fact I thought it was also about FREE SOFTWARE and propetary software like this, this, and this. One of those companies, a produceer of propetary hardware and software, even has its own section here. Then one of the other two has very frequent stories here.

effects

The word you are looking for is affect, because the license has an influence on users of software. It does not bring into existence the users of software.

Now that the pedantic stuff is out of the way, I didn't see anything in the free license that restricts you in use. Sure, it restricts your use of the source, but there was nothing I saw restricting simple use of the program. (My interpretation of section 3d, which says that inclusion of BK software in another system that does source control/configuration management requires you to advertise the fact that you do. Another possibly valid interpretation would be using BitKeeper as a base SCM and build on top of it via scripts and such would require the advertistement. Simply using BK as the source control manager for a source control project would seem to be kosher, given that you did not use any BK bits in your project. Then again, I'm not a lawyer, and neither is RMS, so we both should get lawyers to interpret the license for us before shooting off our mouths.)

Is the use of software now subject to a license?

Yes. That's been the case for quite some time. For commercial software, you're paying for a contract to use the software, not the software itself. If you don't like the terms, then don't use the software, or try to come up with your own contract between you and the publisher. Even the GPL binds you on use of software, depending on how you look at it (you're bound to be able to give the software to other people, for instance).

It's probably not even as bad as that... The relevant clause of the license says:

(c) Notwithstanding any other terms in this License, this License is not available to You if You and/or your employer develop, produce, sell, and/or resell a product which contains substantially similar capabili- ties of the BitKeeper Software, or, in the reasonable opinion of Bit- Mover, competes with the BitKeeper Software.

Stallman is getting as good at this FUD business as IBM was... definitely a sharp fellow and a quick learner. Too bad he can't direct his talents towards something useful... Now McVoy's a major jerk, but at least he's contributing something useful.

Also this page indicates a pricing of about $2000/year/seat for the real tool.

The "panties" quote I can't verify :-)

Mark

Also this page indicates a pricing of about $2000/year/seat for the real tool.

The "panties" quote I can't verify :-)

Mark

Notice Subversion isn't mentioned on der Fuhrer's, Heinrich Larry McVoy, web site. That's because its better. And its doesn't have the lynch mob license.

Everyone, do a Google search on the badmouthing ranting brat, McVoy, here.

You will see he is a ranting brat, who can't really make money doing innovative things, so he copies essentially what Teamware does, and introduces this fucking bullshit license. Look, BSD, Apache, GPL and some slight variations of the said licenses. No, Reichsfuhrer McVoy (Waffen SS) needs to have a EULA that would make lawyers at MSFT personally worship him.

You can see him, prancing and posing on his web page, showing his affiliations with the geeks, and talking of his nice cats, and I love cats, I feel bad they have to be owned by McVoy. I suspect if he is like he is with the cats as he is with licenses, he beats them, then soft talks, pets them, feeds them, gives them milk, then beats them.

He is a minion of darkness, and anti-open-source zealot, a wolf in sheep's clothes, seeking to undermine, erode and destroy the only reason Linux, which is a piece of shit compared to more coherent, beautiful, consistently documentation of which there are too many to name, is the really interesting license that keeps improvements to GNU/Linux source code PUBLIC.

Larry sits upon his lofty perch, his sagely experience career and his all knowingness. He flames and deprecates Linux, with some deserved points, then he offers gratuitous sex to a certain few and gets his BitDungeonKeeper used on the Linux tree, and now it lies, polluted and tainted in an unfree cage dying.

There should be a new troll on Slashdot now, FACT: Free Linux is Dying. [There is no article from Netcraft anymore since people like Larry and others can tell people what the fuck they can and cant do with their software based on whatever other software they are using].

Hi!

You can find a probably biased comparison here:
http://www.bitkeeper.com/Products.Comparisons.CVS. html

-- kryps

i know linus uses one but it's not cvs it's one of the commerical ones i heard.

The term commercial might depend on your definition of the word. The tool in question is BitKeeper. BitKeeper is not free software, but you don't have to pay for using it in Linux development. The use of BitKeeper by a number of kernel hackers does not affect the license of Linux itself.

On the kernel mailing list a few people has been flamed for requesting that kernel documentation does not mention BitKeeper.

I think BitKeeper had a "dead man's switch" clause that would place BitKeeper under the GPL, but I can't find it on the web site...
I found some info here, but it doesn't address the "dead man's switch".

Personally I like Perforce; it's simple, flexible, straightforward, and it's pretty aware of what its job is and isn't. There's a gui client for Windows, and a command line for Unix, and it handles multi-megabyte binary files just fine. But it doesn't do binary diffs well, and it's not set up for different media types. I've heard it can be pretty cheap if you talk to Perforce Sales right (floating head? Don't ask me.)

One system that I've heard game developers rave over is alienbrain, which has built in support for a bunch of different media types and basically assumes it's dealing with a bunch of binary files or images from the get go.

At 10K for ten users it's not exactly freeware, but from the reviews it looks like some game designers love it like their G4 powerbook. But that's probably too expensive.

So another alternative is BitMover, which at the cheapest will cost you $400 a head. But there's also a leasing option that could work out better for you, and you get the warm fuzzies by supporting the software that keeps Linus calm and happy.

Or, finally, you could talk to some CVS consultants. The guys at cyclic could certainly help you out with your problem, and probably more cheaply. At the very least, they should be able to tell you if your problems can be fixed in CVS, and at that point you should have a better shopping list of what to buy in a new system.

1. take a look at PRCS, it has very sophisticated tool for finding diferences between binary files - Xdelta - this might be what you are looking for.
2. the site with good (however incomplete) collection of links.
3. I've found some comparisons among different RCS on BitKeeper site (in favour of BitKeeper of couse ;) ).

Despite staunch opposition from certain developers, Linus has recently started to maintain the kernel using the non-free BitKeeper SCM product, which is not only proprietary but also uses undocumented file formats, making interoperability difficult or impossible. Do you think it's fair to encourage developers who would otherwise keep to Free Software to turn to a proprietary solution and what is in effect, shareware?

Subversion definitely looks interesting. It's under active development and is making fast progress. But I doubt the authors would recommend it yet for production use; it's still in pre-Alpha.

But one important feature that they don't intend to tackle is the ability to have distributed repositories. The idea is that if there are 40 developers working on a shared code tree, but a team of 6 people who are going to making major changes to the code. These 6 developers should be able to easily checkin their code to a local repository until it is ready to atomically merged into the main repository.

There's a good description of this on the BitKeeper web page.

It looks like arch is intending something similar, but the project seems to be progressing fairly slowly.

-Bruce

http://bitkeeper.com/Products.BitKeeper.html

If it's good enough for Linus & friends, it's good enough for me ;-)

MONOLINUX.com :: All Linux. No ads.