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McVoy on BitKeeper, Linus, and Perens

Posted by timothy on from the eggs-in-a-good-basket dept.

Joe Barr writes "The story of how BitKeeper has come to be Linus Torvalds' (and many other kernel hackers) tool of choice in maintaining the Linux development tree is worthy of a book. Here's the Cliff Note's version of McVoy's contribution to Linux kernel development, BitKeeper, and countless hours of flaming on the role of open source and proprietary software."

4 of 40 comments (clear)

  1. Re:A bit biased. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative
    If he advocated that Sun open source SunOS, stating that it was a feasible option, why hasn't he done the same for BitKeeper?

    Sun can still sell hardware. He can't

  2. Re:A bit biased. by RocketJeff · · Score: 4, Informative
    If he advocated that Sun open source SunOS, stating that it was a feasible option, why hasn't he done the same for BitKeeper?
    Simple reason - Sun doesn't make any (or so little it doesn't matter) money selling SunOS/Solaris - it makes its money selling the hardware that runs SunOS/Solaris. Even if they Open Sourced it and people ported it to every non-Sun computer in existance, they still wouldn't lose too many sales - and they'd gain the fixes/enhancements made for free by the Open Source developers.

    BitKeeper, otoh, sells software. If they Open Sourced it, they'd loose a lot (most) of the sales of their ownly product.

    Different companies, different products, different focus.

  3. Re:interesting by rplacd · · Score: 2, Informative

    bitkeeper uses SCCS as its underlying layer, sort of similar to how CVS uses RCS for the files. There are (free) SCCS tools available, so you can probably pull your code out of bk if you feel the urge. Also, as I understand it, if the company ever dies, bk goes open source. Not so proprietary now, is it?

    bk's a great solution to a problem not really addressed by anyone else. Personally, I hope it doesn't go away.

    I don't use it, by the way. I'm thinking of writing a webdav client for a non-Unix operating system, and extending it to support subversion. The bk freebie license prevents me from using bk while working on a competing product.

  4. Bitkeeper: known exploit, no warning, no patch... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    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.