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RMS Weighs In On BitKeeper
An anonymous reader writes ". . . and boy, is he pissed! The BitKeeper license, he told the Linux kernel mailing list, is 'the whip hand' of proprietary software. His brief but pungent comment is carried by Linux and Main."
It seems reasonable enough that Larry would want to prohibit people from using bitkeeper to compete against bitkeeper.
However I think it is telling that the license goes a step further and disallows any person or entity who ever works on a competitor from ever using bitkeeper. So Larry is essentially helping to see that many people (Linux kernel hackers using bitkeeper) are unable to ever compete with him, even if the kernel hacking and open-source-SCM hacking are in no way related. Way to drive a wedge through the free software community.
Normally I don't mind RMS spouting off about something when he has a decent leg to stand on or is using his own forum. In this case, he really doesn't.
First, he didn't seem to choose the right forum to speak in. A listserv for kernel development is not the correct space to bring political speach into. RMS's post was very possibly off topic to the list.
Second Linux is not his project, and he is not managing it. Torvalds has expressed his opinions on the Free Software movement. He doesn't believe in Free Software as an all important political idea, thus he has not don anything wrong by using Bitkeeper. Torvalds chose Bitkeeper, and that's what the project uses. Period.
RMS should attempt to open a serious technical discussion directly with Torvalds. RMS should say "What do you need?" and then deliver it. Or RMS should violate the license in a clearly absurd manner and let Bitkeeper take him to court to test the validity of the license.
Maybe its time for someone to start developing a OSS competitor to BitKeeper (without using BitKeeper of course!)
Nobody will; Why? Nobody has really tried so far- even RMS is too stubborn to ask "Well, what is it that bitkeeper does that (cvs|subversion|arch|pcrs) doesn't do?", and then gone off and tried to implement it- in fact, this is what all of bitkeeper's advocates, including it's creator, Larry McVoy, and Linus Torvalds have been saying all this time. "Make me something better, and we'll use it.". Yet, everyone is very willing to complain, and just ignore when $KERNEL_DEVELOPER_USING_BK says "$FEATURE is something i use every day with BK, and isn't in any of the OSS source management tools."
It's funny how much people will bitch when they're not the ones that have to deal with the inadequacies of $OSS_SM_TOOL when it comes to kernel development.
(Actually, i believe that the subversion author (although i may be wrong about which project) has asked, but they're still a ways off in everyone else's eyes- Hell, even bitkeeper isn't there yet. Larry takes plenty of input and actually implements the missing features that Linus and company ask for, though, which is much better than any oss project.)
I'm fairly dissappointed in RMS in this- You'd think if anyone was going to make a GNUkeeper, it'd be him.
get 0wned. irc.w30wnzj00.com
If you read the entire story, not just the slashdot post. It looks like Bitkeeper is getting a little microsoftian about what type of project they 'allow' you to use with their product.
I am not a huge RMS fan, especially with all of his "it is a GNU/World!!" assertions, but i think he has a good point this time.
Maybe RMS should not cry wolf so often; so we might learn to listen.....
Ghandi had a great point
First they ignore you...
Second they laugh at you...
Then they fight you...
And then you win!
"You answered your own question. The kernel developers decided that BitKeeper was the best tool for the job so they used it"
The kernel developers didn't decide, Linus decided to use BitKeeper!
"That's one of the real strengths of Linux - ideology takes a back seat to getting the job done, and IMO it explains why Linux has been one of the most successful Unix variants."
Untrue. Why do you think they break "kernel module source compatibility" with every patchlevel release? Obviously this has something to do with ideology, because not having to recompile kernel modules is a lot easier to the end user.
You obviously don't know Larry McVoy.
I first met Larry McVoy on usenet. He was highly cogent in his arguments, and generally a very intelligent guy. Unlike a lot of the idiots who came in after the NSF quit running the Internet, you could actually hold a technical discussion with him, after which you would have a solution, or an approach to a solution, for the problem at hand.
I've talked with him on the telephone on several occasions, when issues have come up that merited a telephone conversation; I've called him, and he's called me, though it has been a while since our last voice conversation.
When Larry McVoy left Sun, he wanted to take the SunOS 4.1.3_U1 code (U2 has not yet come out), and release it under the GPL. This was quite visionary, given the amount of competition that Linux is now giving Sun, even internally, within their own engineering staff, these days. Sun would not do the release, because it would cannibalize their SVR4-derived "Solaris" market.
Larry's motivations in this case were, I think, base... in that he wanted to "rescue" the important work which had been done on the BSD dervice Solaris (SunOS) code base. He saw the GPL as a way to do that.
Larry was an early GPL advocate, in this sense. Frankly, I'm glad he failed in this endeavor; it wporbably would have meant the end of BSD derived OSs, which generally exist only because the GPL is too draconian for people who need to do business.
Larry became an outspoken Linux advocate; he authored the "lmbench" suite of micro-benchmarks, all of which show Linux in a good light, compared to its competition. One can argue that these tools drove a number of the important design decisions in the Linux kernel itself, which, among other things, led to the current threading model and code, which *depends* upon the fact that process context switch overhead is minimal, and there is very little difference between it and thread context switch overhead.
Larry advocated Open Source software, in general: BitKeeper, by it's nature, *from the beginning*, offered free licenses those people who woul publish their source archive, as the cost of the license.
Thus, by its nature, BitKeeper encourages free software by providing economic incentive.
But, like the GPL itself, it is an instrumentality, and the instrumentality must not obey the same rules as that on which it acts.
The GPL carries a prohibition against modification: it is not itself under the GPL. Ask yourself "Why?".
For this same reason, good or bad, BitKeeper can not itself be Open Source software. Yes, there are economic issues. Despite people's intentional misinterpretation of the word "support" in Larry's statements to mean "technical support" rather than "economic support", Larry's correct: the Open Source model is not economically self supporting for stategic projects... it only supports itself for tactical projects.
That RMS is complaining about BitKeeper now is, I think, sour grapes. That's the kind interpretation. The unkind interpreation is that BitKeeper is a more effective mechanism than the GPL itself for achiving the goals of the GNU Manifesto, of which the GPL is an instrumentality.
So before you call Larry an idiot, or blindly GPL or even BSDL your next set of source code, understand the long term consequences of the license.
Frankly, I'm glad he's let go of the understandable bitterness that comes from pouring your soul into a product, only to have it hidden away in a vault by an employer with goals other than advancement of the art and science of computer science.
I think this license demonstrates that he's come to his senses, on strategic issues -- a painful lesson. Would that RMS would so the same.
Thanks,
-- Terry
It already did. If you are on a campus where anyone (not you - anyone) is working on patches to CVS you are not allowed to use Bitkeeper in the same way I am. What's not arbitary about that?
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"