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BitMover Releases Open Source BitKeeper Client
diegocgteleline.es writes "Larry McVoy, the owner of BitKeeper (also one of the guys behind LMbench) has posted a message to linux-kernel where he announces a open source client of BitKeeper, which would only allow synching against BK trees. It looks like it's licensed under the NWL (No Whining License) that will force you to 'not whine about this product or any other products from BitMover, Inc.'"
So.. this doesn't run under WINE then.
So.. this doesn't run under WINE then.
Ba-dum-ching.
Don't be a stupid. At least read the mailing list posting:
Too late.
Right know, I put my expectations on Bazaar-NG: all the goodies of GNU Arch and the simple interface of Subversion. Developed by Canonical (of Ubuntu fame).
Windows users:
Internet Explorer is obsolete. Please upgrade to Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox.
Larry's entitled to license things under any license he wants to. It's HIS product. However, having said this, it's still quite understandable for people to not want Linux development being tied to a closed-source product with nasty gotchas in it's free license. That's not whining in the least.
The only thing resembling "whining" seems to be coming from Larry himself with this silly license. All it's going to do is make the acrimony WORSE, not better. Kind of childish, in my not so humble opinion.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
Actually he said in the email that the whining license was a joke and he's actually licensing it as BSD (and later said it could even be considered public domain), though until the source code is re-released with proper license headers, I doubt his statement to lkml is legally binding in any way.
-Tupshin
I wonder if someone could extend said license to other things in life such as Family, Jobs and Girlfriends..
mnewberg.com
I don't know how relevant this is, not quite getting the gist of the article, but does this sentence (linked from the word message in the article) make any difference? Or was I not supposed to follow any of the links?
Don't worry about the license, it's a joke. BSD license OK with everyone?
Neopets - the best free game on the Int
There are so much real open alternatives like subversion, arch and (my personal favourite) darcs - just to name a few. Why bother with bitkeeper?
Need a Wiki? Check out DokuWiki
Thinking of his track record, I wouldn't bet on his software. First you couldn't do anything, then you couldn't even use it if you were messing with other source control systems, now he is saying it is free for anything. If someone reverse engineers a GPL/BSDL BitKeeper server clone using the client will he tolerate it or will he try to crush it? That's the crux of it.
Don't worry about the license, it's a joke. BSD license OK with everyone?
You ain't from round here, are ya, boy?
"BitKeeper has made me more than twice as productive, and its fundamentally distributed nature allows me to work the way I prefer to work - with many different groups working independently, yet allowing for easy merging between them."
-- Linus Torvalds, February 2004
Linus did it. I can too! *jumps on the bandwagon*
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They should have used the Open Profanity License instead!
- shadowmatter
I wonder how this bitkeeper thing compares to the state of the art, Perforce. Perforce charges $700 per seat, and after working with it for years, I can say it's worth it. Everything is just the way it should be. I wish someone would reimplement the damn thing under GPL license. After using Perforce at work, all other systems look like a joke.
Blockquoth the site:
US is now divided as the "Red" and "blue" states. Red States = communist countries. Coincidence? I think not
No, your attitude is the one with the problem. No current open source solution adequate? Then help make one that is- either by improving an existing alternative, or starting your own.
...if you're trying to do the community a service. If you're looking to put food on the table doing something completely unrelated (where this is simply a support function), it is mindnumbingly stupid. Most likely you're long out of business by the time it is working.
Sure, if all you need is some minor customization, maybe. But if it clearly isn't anywhere near being up to the task, pick something non-OSS. Earn some money, help out the projects where it is feasible to replace proprietary with OSS.
That is the way OSS projects prospers. I make a 98% solution a 100% one. That makes it a 98% solution for someone else, who'll make it a 100% solution for them. And the snowball is rolling. Not by one company breaking its back trying to bring it from 40% to 100%.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Larry McVoy, BitMover Founder, gave a great talk about BitKeeper and the delta development model at SCALE 3x (Southern California Linux Expo) last month. Its available online here. -Ilan
I admire your ideology-before-productivity attitude, though... inspiring.
A copy of NWL can be found at http://lkml.org/lkml/2003/12/14/47/:
/*
* tarball.c copyright (c) 2003 BitMover, Inc.
*
* Licensed under the NWL - No Whining License.
*
* You may use this, modify this, redistribute this provided you agree:
* - not to whine about this product or any other products from BitMover, Inc.
* - that there is no warranty of any kind.
* - retain this copyright in full.
*/
So far as I can see on their website, BitMover fall under that heading.
_O_
.|< The named which can be named is not the true named
This is true for most real world objects. Only software is radically different.
You can also hack your own fridge all you want without dmca style rules coming into play.
So his anology works for a skilled craftsman anyway.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
BK isn't actually SCCS based, but it looks like SCCS to external programs which allows make, emacs, patch etc to work seamlessly. It certainly resembles SCCS in the way it manages deltas between versions however.
The Changeset idea is very nice and you can do a lot of cool stuff. eg if someone integrates a bugfix and your manager decides at the last minute that it shouldn't go in, you can generate an anti-changeset which reverses it. Then you can generate an anti-anti-changeset to reintegrate it. I'd like to see someone trying that on Perforce on a change with 100 files inside.
What if that GPL/BSD project is a replacement for Perforce?
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
This license would never be approved for the "Open Source" logo by OSI. If necessary, I would suggest that we change the OSD to make sure that a license does not impose restrictions on freedom of speech. Sheesh.
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
I admire your ideology-before-productivity attitude, though... inspiring.
That is a very unfair (and inaccurate) characterization of the grandparent post.
Productivity is only one factor, and often not the most critical one. Just as any liability lawyer, security consultant, or sysadmin whose had to recover using an offsite backup.
Your data is your most valuable possession. The cost (in time, energy, money, resources, you name it) of creating your data far outweighs the value of the hardware it resides on, the software you paid for, and probably even the office in which it resides. It is the one thing insurance can't replace, and the one thing you (or your business) probably can't live without.
Having your data (e.g. the Linux kernel) beholden to a proprietary product, managed in a proprietary format, is over the long term quite foolhardy. Imagine, for example, if Microsoft were to buy Bitkeeper (this is hardly unimaginable, and arguably not so unlikely). It isn't an "end of the world" scenerio by any means, but it is damn inconvinient to move the kernel sources to another revision control system, and unfortunately for the kernel developers, there is unlikely to be a libre one that suits their purposes available because they haven't been contributing feedback, criticisms, and suggestions for improvement to any of the free projects by virtue of the fact that they aren't using any of them and so aren't in a position to make said suggestions, etc.
It is generally a mistake to have one's data beholden to a proprietary product. Sometimes it can't be avoided, and sometimes the cost is worthwhile. And sometimes, the results are absolutely catastrophic. Unfortunately, in the case of the Linux kernel, if the results should be catastrophic in some manner, it will be catastrophci for the millions upon millions of Linux users around the world. OTOH there are enough tarballs and parallel CVS repositories around that such a scenerio is very unlikely. What isn't so unlikely is the "OMFG this is painful, we'll have to move to $free-rcs and its going to cost us at least a couple of months productivity."
Now, in the case of the Kernel, Linus has judged these risks to be small enough, and his productivity improvements to be great enough, for the potential tradeoff to be worthwhile. The grandparent post has judged the opposite. Both may be correct for their respective problem domains, but to characterize the one as "ideology-before-productivity" is very disingenuous, and ignores a whole slew of real-world issues that proprietary management schemes, formats, and restrictions bring to the table.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
How about full disclosure? Darcs is also really slow, an absolute pig with memory (pretty much requires 1G even for small trees) and falls over on projects even half the size of the Linux kernel. It's a a very good start, but Darcs has a long way to go before it is useful in the real world.
Actually I am a libertarian, but like everyone else, I do have to live in the real world. Actions have consequences. If you stick your hand in a running garbage disposal, you'll pull out a stump. If you use Michael Jackson as a babysitter, you child will get buggered. If you incessantly whine about your right to incessantly whine, someone's going to beat the crap out of you.
As a liberatarian, it won't be me who will be pounding your face into a pulp, but as someone who has to live in the real world, don't expect me to be standing at the head of the line to come to your defense.
Yes, you have the right to be annoying. No, you don't have the right to prevent other people from getting annoyed.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
There are lots of OSS/FS software configuration management (SCM) tools. CVS, Subversion (SVN), and GNU arch get lots of press, but there are many others such as Aegis, CVSNT, Darcs, FastCST, OpenCM, Vesta, Codeville, Bazaar and Bazaar-NG.
You might also take a peek at my paper Software Configuration Management (SCM) Security.
- David A. Wheeler (see my Secure Programming HOWTO)