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No More BitKeeper Linux
An anonymous reader writes "KernelTrap has a lengthy article detailing BitMover's recent decision to drop support for its free version of BitKeeper. Linus Torvalds began using BitKeeper back in February of 2002, a decision that has resulted in frequent flamefests, but also in increased kernel development productivity. Evidently the recent decision was due to OSDL's decision to keep paying a developer who was working on reverse engineering BitKeeper... What tool Linus will move to is still being determined."
I cant wait for the "I told you so" articles. Lets put money on whose will be best. I have my money on Richard Stallman.
Having quickly read the RTFA, it looks like the motivation behind BitMover's hissy-fit was that a contractor of OSDL was working on reverse engineering BitKeeper's protocol in his spare time, and OSDL must have refused to, or failed to make him to stop (ouch, threatening someone's job to make them stop doing open source in their spare time, not cool!). BitMover's CEO claims to be on the side of open source, yet last time I checked interoperability was a good thing, and reverse engineering was a legitimate way to achieve it. Not according to CEO Larry McVoy, to him reverse engineering is evil, and those that do it are "bad apples" that should be punished by the rest of the open source movement.
Of course, lots of this is my own suppositions based on reading between the lines of the article, I am sure if I have got anything wrong people will be quick to correct me.
It won't be that POS that is ClearCase.
Man, remember all those people "flaming" over the freedom of tools on the lists? What was with them, anyway? Aren't they just starting a "religious war?" Who cares if this tool is free. It didn't cost me anything. Those crazy license zealots.
But wait.
Now, look what happened. The company (or individual) that was your friend a couple of years ago, decides today that you've offended them. Now they are taking their ball and going home.
Now you are stuck. You need to replace what they gave you. Oh, it'll cost you: manpower, lost opportunities, potentially a pile of pesos... Get ready for a painful transition. And as annoying and dangerous as this is for source control in mainline kernel development, there are many, many scenarios where this kind of manuevering will screw you much worse - alienating your customers, stranding years of development, the whole works.
This is why freedom matters.
And what is BitMover so upset about? That anyone would dare compete with them?
The audacity!
Does any vendor of a commercial product have a moral high ground to complain when a competitor appears? And whose problem is it if they are trying to charge money for something other will do for free?
Tired of Political Trolls? Opt Out!
In response to the article on Java in OpenOffice, and the hubabaloo that GPL purists were makeing about it... I wrote: ~"Linus is using Bitkeeper, Everyone should drop linux now and HURD everone to something else"
Score: -1 (Troll)
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH
I told you so. Did I not tell you? WHAT DID I SAY? It's bad enough they don't put a GNU/ in front of the thing, but NOW this happens. I told Torvalds, you will rue the day, you will rue the day you used BitKeeper, but noooooo. He called me a crack addict and used it anyways. I get no respect. -- RMS
and KDE org have just started shifting their entire source tree to bitkeeper as well... ;)
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
Considering what has transpired, the obvious choice is subversion:)
"Provided by the management for your protection."
Note that Larry McVoy has pointed out that the number of improvements to the commercial version due to suggestions from Open Source developers has been dropping sharply. To me, that means "giving free copies to these guys has been beneficial to my bottom line, but isn't doing much for me lately, in the financial sense". It sounds like this reverse-engineering issue is a smokescreen, a scapegoat for cutting off the "freeloaders" (those contributing to improving the product).
So, he's in it for the money. Is anyone surprised?
I always equivocate. Well, almost always.
I don't understand why the community is up in arms about Linus using a different tool for kernel development. If that's what he feels most productive using, what difference does it make? On a side note, found an interesting wiki on the history of bitkeeper http://www.osdl.org/cgi-bin/osdl_development_wiki. pl?action=history&id=OSDL_Bitkeeper.Osdl.Org_How_T o
It's a realativly interesting read if you want to know more about it.
Read this discussion on /. for more more info:
http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/0 3/18/0255216&tid=156&tid=162&tid=106
fuvoo: watch something
Here
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
... be the best choice?
Having your development workflow at the whim of a single proprietary vendor? How.. What's the word I'm looking for here?
Let's hope the free tools are as far along as Linus et al. need them to be.. I guess there'll be a lot more hacking on them now that the crutch has been pulled away...
Get 'em hooked on the gimmes, then ream 'em on the return.
Let's hope that the impending avalanche of negativity will influence BitKeeper to reconsider at least a token giveback to the Linux community.
I'm not tense. I'm just terribly, terribly, alert.
> What tool Linus will move to is still being
> determined."
Who bloody cares?
Yes, this will be modded down as a troll, but seriously: who cares? I use what I use because it suits ME. What Linus uses isn't even remotely interesting to me, or important.
Enough with the hero worship.
No gods, no demons, and no masters. Secular Humanism!
Pulling the plug on bk is probably just
;-), darcs, monotone!
the thing free SCM development was waiting for.
Now you go arch, bazaar-ng, cvs
Subversion, of course. What else is there? RCS? CVS?
OSS communities tend to settle on one project, and nothing or noone ever seriously competes with it. Ie; the linux kernel, SAMBA, OO.o, Mozilla, GIMP, eventually either KDE or Gnome (heck, used to be lots of desktops), etc..
In the source control realm, it seems to be all about subversion. It seems to have the mindshare and community behind it.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
...perhaps the kernel will follow.
I've become a recent fan of Martin Pool, and I've been keeping tabs on his work with Bazaar-NG, his next generation version of Bazaar, as a distributed free source code control system, for Ubuntu. It's early in development yet, but if there's one thing I've learned from Martin Pool, is he does great work! Keep tabs on him. :)
- - - -
KickingDragon
What's wrong with the free version he already has? Does it require replacement?
I don't see this as a problem for the time being.
Does he really think that it is appropriate to transfer a military practice onto a community which supposes to act transparently, democratically (yes, there's a meritocracy, but also democracy) and with respect for individual rights (eg working on private project in their spare time).
Great way to squash all diversity and enforce group-think.
The linux community is full of tools. This won't be a problem.
Slashdot, come for the goatse, stay for the trolls.
If you believe the comparison bitkeeper does with other SCM tools, it looks like it is the best tool, except for sun's teamwear, which is only worse in the tools it provides (opinions, opinions).
So, it looks hard to replace it without loosing a lot of functionality. But what if Linus gets a free license from BK? After all BitKeeper benefits from the publicity it gets.
Doesn't BitMover realize that companies license their products due to Linus using it? Linus's sarcastic comments about BitMover just pushes companies away, as probably intended. Won't that just screw themselves over?
-b0lt
got sig?
Perforce is free for open source development.. for now.. ;-)
It's a bit silly to say 'I told you so" - especially since I didn't actually say it. I thought the arguments made by Linus had some logic behind it too (the technical-merrit-before-anything-else approach). Often I thought both sides (Stallman and Linus) had some valuable viewpoint on it, and it was difficult to say who actually was right on the matter.
It seems now, after all, it was R.Stallman all along. Yes, Linus has a good point in chosing for technical superior alternatives...BUT, in the end, as is clearly shown now, you can't just devide the political/ideological/proprietary issue from the mere technical one. When push comes to shove, an alternative that isn't really free, isn't really an alternative. You are always dependend on the goodwill of whomever owns the product- even when buying it, I may add.
So, it would seem the viewpoint of Linus, in this instance, is the weaker one, because now he doesn't have a 'tecnological superior' product anymore, and what is he going to do? Go for another proprietary product, because it's technologically better? And have the same thing happen to him again? I don't think so. I think he learned his lesson, and he will go for the really free alternatives that R.Stallman suggested, which, albeit not as good, at least allow you to continue with it as you see fit.
Stallman can be a nag sometimes because of his gnu/linux diatribe, but in this instance, he was right.
--- "To pee or not to pee, that is the question." ---
You hit the nail on the head. Now I wish someone would mod my comment down a bit, this one deserves to be higher up on the page :-)
If this is true, BitMover should expect a big financial hit.
BitKeeper's main claim to fame was that Linus and the kernel folks used it. That's the kind of endorsement that you can't buy for any amount of money. Without that, most people would never even know BitKeeper exists.
Its a really stupid move. An open source competitor might have taken some of their business, but most of the open source users would probably be using something else free anyway. 90% of corporate customers would rather pay for something. An open source clone would probably validate BitKeeper.
Not to mention the ill will they will generate.
New Linux Warez Scene Busted!
BSA agents said to be working with FOSS kernel hacker Torvalds in continued enquiries. Acting on an anonymous tip the BSA and FBI and homeland security busted down the doors of OSDL and confiscated nearly all the caffeine based beverages as a kind of psyhcological siege tactic.
Torvalds himself offered a "no comment" in response to allegations that he was "heavily dependant" on reverse engineered updates to BitKeepr software for linux due to the proprietrary official vendor software being withdrwan.
"none of us could handle handle cold turkey" shouted an angry Linus.
Further speculations continue as to why Torvalds and OSDL is of such interest to the BSA despite no one being formally charged.
there are whispers of plea bargaining and possible witness relocation.
Isn't it obvious Source Forge just like all the other OSS projects.
He can announce new releases on FreshMeat and close up the LKML.
If you had read the article you would have seen that "OSDL [getting] greedy" was that they merely refused to stop funding a guy who also, in his spare time and not being paid by OSDL, was attempting to reverse-engineer BitKeeper.
Not OSDL's problem.
-- This is not a sig
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
I guess freedom is actually way more important than function now isn't it.... Had the developers not fallen into the non-free trap a alternative would have already existed by now do to need.
Got Code?
This brings up the question of how much effort it is to move from BitKeeper to something else (like maybe Subversion). On the surface, this would seem to be a straightforward process of setting up the new software, loading the bits, and modifying the check-in and check-out scripts. Does anyone have some deeper insight?
Pitty I have responded in this thread also, or I would mod you up for this post, and down in the one below (which, indeed, was flamebite).
But you were right in your original assessement. That said, let's not forget that, at least in the former version, Freenet was heavily dependent on suns' java too.
There IS merit in taking the " only technological superiour" route, only one takes a risk as well, as is shown in this case.
--- "To pee or not to pee, that is the question." ---
...in the commercial community binary managment is critical. For example, someone may be tracking a 1 MB word document that goes through hundreds of revisions resulting in consuming 1 GB of space.
That may be the stupidest things I've ever heard. Clearly, Word-formatted documents are the wrong format to be using.
Software Wars
"I have to say that the open source community couldn't have failed more than they have" -- Larry McVoy
Thanks for that Larry, and good riddance.
Have you got your LWN subscription yet?
The whole thing happened because of lack of trust from the free software community. I bet BitMover wouldn't care much if there was an odd person in OSDL reverse-engineering the client to make a port to his pet OS or to learn good programming. Instead RMS kept preaching that BK is evil and must be killed and replaced, and I guess too many people listened. Would you do anything for people with such hostile intentions towards you? And so RMS created the very situation he was warning people about. Which was probably exactly what he wanted.
This is not to say that reverse-engineering is wrong. I have a right to read your source or binaries as any copyrighted book and use general ideas I learned in my future proprietary or open-source projects. I think I will go to read some Emacs code right now to get some hints for my future BSD-licensed project. Yum! What is wrong is plagiarism or fighting people who are trying to help.
I told you so. I said it quietly, and never bothered a mailing list with it, that I recall, but anyone who brought up BK in front of me got a very serious "this is the end of the conversation, unless you want to hear my opinion on the damage BK is doing to open source."
There are several ways in which BK was a lose, but the one thing that always stuck out for me was their attitude toward their "customers". This idea that you could use their software, but you couldn't use it if you were potential competition. Even Microsoft has never stooped that low.
If you had read the article you would have seen that "OSDL [getting] greedy" was that they merely refused to stop funding a guy who also, in his spare time and not being paid by OSDL, was attempting to reverse-engineer BitKeeper.
You mean a guy who "was accused of attempting to reverse-engineer BitKeeper." From TFA, it doesn't seem to be at all confirmed that this was really the case.
Larry could accuse anybody who's working on an open-source source code management system of "reverse-engineering" bitkeeper, if they implement any remotely similar feature(s). For all we know, that's the case here. McVoy comes off as a presumptious, arrogant asshole to me, and I for one would not be surprised if he's just blowing smoke about this in order to have an excuse to cancel the free BitKeeper.
Why was this moderated down? No one said you had to like this person's opinionb, but if you disagree, you should reply with a counter argument rather than trying to punish the person for expressing their opinion. That's the real geek tragedy, how we treat people in our community who disagree.
I'm sorry for all the pain this is likely to cause the Kernel developers that were relying on it, but I can't say I'm sad to see McVoy and his noise go away.
About 50 posts and nobody has suggested the possibility that M$ could have paid off Bitkeeper in a move to "hurt" linux, has everyone left their conspiracy hats at home today?
Larry explained that a contracter still under pay from OSDL for an unrelated project was also actively working on reverse engineering the BitKeeper protocol. Discussion began about five weeks ago to try and resolve the situation, getting so far as to obtain a verbal agreement that the individual would stop his efforts. After that time, however, it turned out that the reverse engineering effort had continued. Although OSDL wasn't directly paying for the reverse engineering effort, they were still employing someone who was actively developing a competing product, something the free BitKeeper license doesn't allow. Larry added, "OSDL had a chance to resolve this issue, but instead shrugged their shoulders and said 'it's not my problem'". It became the proverbial straw that broke the camel's back. Weighing this and earlier transgressions against the $500,000 dollars a year BitMover spends developing and supporting the free BitKeeper tool, the tough decision was made to phase out support and availability of their free product.
If this is true, then I have lost a lot of respect for OSDL and Linus. They intentionally tried to deceive BitMover, and Linus was supporting that deception. This is a clear example of biting the hand that feeds you.
Linus: You should be ashamed of yourself for allowing this to happen. You had an agreement with BitMover, and you broke it. You could have influenced OSDL to not allow the contractor to continue his theft of BitMover's work, but you didn't.
And the men who hold high places must be the ones who start
To mold a new reality... closer to the heart
He goes on to compare the activities of an individual deleoper to a "bad apple" in the Marine Corps!
Rhetorical fussilades like this really expose what an unbearable asshole he is.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Good to see that Larry McVoy has ascended to new, never before seen levels of cunt.
I always knew he had it in him.
I think he deserves a round of applause.
Although BitMover announced that they'll stop developing their free (as in beer) BitKeeper client, there is an open source client to replace it. I don't see what's the big fuss.
In fact, considering that Linus feels BitKeeper is far superior to anything else out there (including subversion, arch etc.) and has been using the commercial version for ages, why would he stop using it now? It's not like users and other developers cannot access the source code anymore.
Also, Linus has never been fanatical about using only free software. He has said many times that he prefers the better tool, whether it's free or not. And its his choice.
I saw something like this happening.
....
Wish I'd put my thoughts down somewhere I could point to & say I told you so.
(After the McVoy/Lord stuff I donated to Arch development & was going to participate, but life happened)
I don't know if you noticed but the biggest pain ahead for Linus & Co is to support a single repository that is accessible from both tools (BitKeeper and Free/Libre tool that will replace it). As the article mentions, quite a few organisations bought licenses for BitKeeper to allow their developers to contribute to the Linux kernel. Do you think they will be willing to switch?
I hope this great mess in which Linus ended up will teach him and everybody else a lesson.
Just heard the count; The SlashDot effect on a Shoutcast Stream is (drumroll please)...85 users.
C'Mon guys! If we can SlashDot a ShoutCast Server, that'd be worthy of a blurb in the IT section...
"When I am king, you will be first against the wall..."
Larry McVoy always seems to say the politically correct thing... and yet despite (or perhaps because of) that, reading the article, he seems a character of subtle manipulativeness and businessy slime.
On a slightly different topic, I find it amusing that things turned out as they did. I vaguely recall reading Larry on the kernel mailing list semi-regularly tell Stallman to get off his ass and write something better.
Yeah, I know... reverse engineering, copy-cat, et cetera. Still... I feel this has a rather delicious irony to it.
Akarsz Magyar Gentoo fórumot? Akkor
Sources are reporting that BitKeeper's decision was primarily based on Linus' refusal to PAY THE $599 SCO LICENSE FEE.
I, for one, welcome our new Antichrist overlord.
Perforce isn't bad in many respects (I'd much rather use it than be stuck with CVS!) but it doesn't do any of the above, all of which I found valuable when I was using Teamware.
What else is there that compares? I haven't found anything in my survey of CM tools.
"this is really an open source community problem and I have to say that the open source community couldn't have failed more than they have." He pointed out that as a long-time open source fanatic and the CEO of BitMover, "we represent as open-source friendly a commercial organization as you are *ever* going to see"
"Unlike the Marine corp, the open source community is more than willing to ignore their bad apples as 'not my problem' (the Marine corp punishes the group for the behavior of the bad apples, pretty soon there are no bad apples)."
This supposed open source fanatic obviously doesn't have a frickin clue. Comparing OSS developers to the Marine corp makes no sense, as there is no single organization that all OSS programmers belong to. Even if you had the desire to do so, you can't sit and police a group when you have no authority. OSDL quite simply wasn't going to stop doing business with a guy because of what he does in his free time, nor should they have to. It is none of their business, nor is it McVoy's.
He's got to be delusional if he thinks he's got the most open source friendly commercial organization out there. There are a lot of companies that work in the OSS world without bullying other developers. McVoy has turned his company into a joke amongst the OSS crowd, and will probably promptly run it bankrupt too. And I have to say, it looks good on him.
It's been very interesting, being fairly new to using free software, to watch these kinds of conflicts developing among free software advocates. My father tends to ask, "How are they making their money?" when I show him some impressive piece of free (beer and speech) Linux software I have installed and configured. He still is surprised when I tell him it's basically volunteers, or at best a group of programmers who wouldn't mind if a company paid them to support the software.
Any idealistic movement must deal with this kind of common-sense reality. The same thing happens every Sunday when a family of Christians, who would probably not be too happy to see a son or daughter required to work on Sunday, goes out to eat at a restaurant. However, this family might realize that the people working on Sunday probably don't care themselves, and they might be happy to get the extra hours.
The same thing goes for closed source, commercial software. It will be here forever, just like World Book will still be selling encyclopedias after Wikipedia trebles in size and quality.
So, my message to free software idealists who hate the idea of closed source: deal with it, use it when you have to, replace it when you can. Just because you don't agree with it doesn't mean you have to abolish it (isn't that the point of freedom and tolerance anyway?). The benefit of not being perceived a fanatic is much greater than the benefit of advocating sweeping, impractical reforms.
In the meantime, I'm rooting for that reverse engineering project...
on the linux kernel mailing list
Grab his pumpgun and kick down the door of some open source developer who allegedly did something totally legal, i.e. reverse engineer a piece of software in his free time?
And while he was at it, should he have killed all the great open source developers reverse engineering other proprietary protocols, like the samba guys?
Well, duh? Everyone knows that CVS is like, shitty and all. Subversion is teh cool thing to use. Uh duh?
Subversion is just like CVS but, it's like totally new and all so, it's like really kewl. You would know this if you weren't like, such a dork and all.
TTTH Toodles.
Is the Arch project really still going? I took a look at the home page, and version 2.0 is "postponed indefinately" [sic] and the other, lower versions have strange notes about not being workable, etc.
I like the idea of an open source Bitkeeper-style repo system, but should I keep an eye on Arch, or has it hit a wall?
I, for one, welcome our new Antichrist overlord.
It appears that Bitmover is only ending support for and further availability (after one more version for a critical bugfix) of the free client. Licenses for the free client aren't being (and quite possibly can't be) revoked retroactively, so as long as you get your copy of the free client before July 1st you're fine. Now maybe the bkbits server will change to no longer accept connections from the free client, but if that's the case it seems all that's necessary is for projects using bkbits to find another host (have one commercial server license, perhaps).
here
Read here
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/4/6/121
user@ubuntubox:~$ stfu This server is going down for shutdown NOW!
In the big picture Linux seems to be having a really hard time (not commercially), compared to (just an example) Mac OS X having a good time. I predict Linux being embraced even more by big corporations (read IBM and Sun) and not being cool anymore. Linux on the desktop will still fail to deliver, again, maybe not commercially, and Linux on the server will mainly be about big, boring said corps (not Marine) and dispersed hobbyists.
Or should this just be viewed as an isolated misjudgement by the otherwise great Linus?
I'll answer the next three responses here:
"If you follow some of the links from the article, it talks about productivity doubling since using BitKeeper."
There is, ofcourse, always the matter that there might be a relation noted, but therefor not a causality. Is there really a heightened production? Is it due to Bitkeeper? Is it *all* due to Bitkeeper?
Those are reasonable questions, and I think, even the neutral Linus could be biased a bit in this regard, because after all, he has made and kept to this decision for 3 years, contrary to much critique.
"Even if there is a cost now moving to something else, it may still work out better in terms of productivity to have used BitKeeper for the three years. Also the use of BitKeeper in Linux seems to encouraged a lot of work on open source alternatives, so they may well be better now than they would have been had BitKeeper not been chosen."
The cost will not be minute, I assure you. Yes, it *might* have been worthwile, but I have problems with this 'might' because it is largely based on speculation. If it really is all that much beneficial, he (Linus) would obviuosly chose another technological superior, yet proprietary system. I doubt that he will, however. Well, we'll see.
"So from the practical, rather than ideological, point of view, even with dropping it now it may still have been the best choice."
See above.
"When you are provided a powerful tool for no cost under the condition that you don't fund the creation of a competing tool based on that technology you are not at the whim of someone's goodwill."
Ermm...yes, you are. I don't follow you: you just describe a situation where, at least in that instance, you are at the whim, and you claim it's indicative that you aren't? Unless you equal 'whim' with totally unreasonable demands, this makes no sense. however, being depended on the goodwill of someone does not infer being unreasonable: they can have very good reasons (even economical ones are good too, in a sense); but still it remains a fact you are at their mercy.
"When they approached OSDL and said you have a employee doing this (reverse engineering our technology), please have them stop and OSDL says it's not our problem."
See above. Besides, reverse engeneering isn't illegal per sé, so they were right to say it's not there problem.
"Its not like they all of the sudden started says hey OSDL/Linus you now need to start paying for this since you like it. They said we are giving you free access to our tool but you have staff that are now striking at our revenue line, which happens to be how we fund this tool you like. Please have them stop and we will continue to provide this tool."
That's very amicable (or not) of them, but it still means one is not free to use the tool; thus, one is dependend on their goodwill.
"When you still thumb your nose at the company who has employees to support and revenue to generate you are only putting them under the gun."
See above.
"So based on this evidence you can see this isn't a RS versus Linus issue versus a OSDL taking responsibility issue. If OSDL came back to the table and said Ok, mea culpa, we will make this right then the problem wouldn't be there."
Yes, it would, since it would still be clear that they are not really free. If they can say 'do not do this" they can say "do not do that" neither. Whether it is reasonable from their perspective or not doesn't enter the picture: it still makes it clear that they can't use the tool totally free.
"Make Sense?"
Not really, when you look at it strictly from the viewpoint of whether or not they are delivered to the goodwill of the owners of Bitkeeper. This shows they aren't, whether Bitkeepers owners were reasonable in their demands or not.
"RMS was not necessarily right. In TFA Linus is quoted as saying "three years of using BitKeeper has made some profound improvements to the workflow""
I answered this already at th
--- "To pee or not to pee, that is the question." ---
Attempts to reverse engineer some of BitKeeper's features have lead to repeated cautions by BitMover.
Yeah ... and they might have even led to repeated cautions, too.
Okay, he just hit 1005 total users. Cool.
Anyways, if anyone is a Hardcore/Dance/Techno fan, hit the site in the grandparent.
"When I am king, you will be first against the wall..."
Consider this: If the stories are to be believed, Linux development experienced significant gains in productivity for the several years it was done with BitKeeper. Now we need to move off of BitKeeper.
If we got several years of significantly increased productivity, for the cost of two brief SCCS transitions (one onto BK, the other off from BK), is that such a bad deal?
1) Linus has admitted using plenty of closed source software in the past. (How was he playing those DVDs?) and unlike RMS and a lot of other major philosophical kooks, Linus is a reasonable man.
2) There is nothing else that even comes close to being as usable and productive on Linux as Linus has recently pointed out.
If there is a "Best Tool For The Job", the BK is it on Linux, free or not. Till someone else steps up to the plate and bests it and is independantly wealthy enough to not need to make any money from it, there is no reason to not use it, even if *GASP* you have to pay for it.
Contrary to popular belief, coding is not all free blow-jobs and beer. Those things cost MONEY!
Larry noted that the kernel tree will continue to be tracked by BitKeeper, as many kernel developers have been commercially licensing the product for that purpose. This includes employees of many large companies who actively contribute to Linux development such as IBM, Intel, HP, Nokia and Sun as well as many smaller companies.
I'm not familiar with BitKeeper. Can anyone comment on the possible ramifications of having all these large-scale commercial contributors using a tool that Linus & Co no longer use/have access to?
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
As per subject.
The real problem is the shortsightedness of those in the open source community who invested time and expertise in a product not guaranteed to be open and available now and in the future.
Some things to keep in mind:
- Technical features alone do not make a product.
- A corporation's word or stated intentions is not worth a damn.
- The license is what counts, not promises.
Hopefully, this lesson will not need to be repeated.Quoting Larry in the article:
"our position is that we don't think we have any chance of changing how the 'open source community' behaves. Unlike the Marine corp, the open source community is more than willing to ignore their bad apples as 'not my problem' (the Marine corp punishes the group for the behavior of the bad apples, pretty soon there are no bad apples). [...]
Unlike the Marine CorpS, people who contribute to Linux have no special cadre bond. Nobody, by dint of writing kernel patches, implicitly decided to give up elements of personal freedom in other areas of their lives, professional or personal.
What was especially galling here, I think, was that Larry decided that reverse engineering, interoperability, and parallel development is what made a bad apple. Um, hello? You're marketing this to Linux hackers?
If Microsoft asked for this, hackers would rebel. If Sun asked for this, hackers would rebel. And even if Red Hat or Ximian asked for it, you'd see a bunch of ornery hackers getting out ethereal, ddd, and strace. It's just their nature.
Just think if Minix's license said "you can use this for free, as long as you aren't creating a competing operating system". Or if AT&T's educational Unix license said "we can revoke this if somebody on the other side of campus is releasing a free compiler that competes with ours."
Websites dedicated to spotting companies using GPL code without giving back to the community. CherryOS steals PearPC and everyone's panties get into a bunch. String them up, being out the torches, blah, blah.
A company puts out their code with the condition that it can be used for free (as in beer), as long as the end user doesn't try and reverse engineer it. And what happens, an OSS COMPANY, attempts to reverse engineer the product. The COMPANY says oops sorry, and then again starts to reverse engineer the free beer product.
Why are you propeller heads so blinded. As wrong as it is for people to break or ignore the GPL it is equally wrong what OSDL did. Linus is not a fool. Linus knew better than most the terms of the license. And frankly, Linus, crew, OSDL, should live to a higher standard than others. For them to ignore the license agreement of another, but expect others to uphold their license is bs.
BitMover should sue OSDL for violating their license. And the developer attempting to reverse engineer their protocols.
So I find this interesting, do all of the religous nuts want to go down and storm MySQL's gates? I understand they have a pretty big organization.
Bring on the rants. The argument the BM is a company, and companies are evil is bs. OSDL is a company too, and their shareholders are their employees.
I have one thing to say:
FARK OFF Larry McVoy. I'm so glad I'll never have to read another thing by you again.
It needed to be said.
BitMover is a company. They're trying to put food on the table (this ain't M$). All this time they've been providing a free version of their software, with support, to the OSS community partly out of their own generosity and partly because they're hoping the karma would rub off in the form of more sales.
/. is jeering BitMover and Linux, not bothering to notice that OSS developers not been trying to run BitMover out of business, they'd still have a free supported version of BitKeeper today.
Then they discover that an OSDN employee is working on a copy of their lifeblood software. Not a better or different tool mind you. A reverse engineered duplicate. The very same community that they've basically donated their software to is biting them in the ass.
So what do you do? If you're a rational economic player you do what will maximize profit over the long term. Apparently BitMover thought the rational move was to yank BitKeeper. That was probably an IRrational move because of the negative publicity, but what else are they going to do, keep providing free support for a product until the OSS community has duplicated them and thrown them in the trash?
And of course everyone on
You screwed yourselves kiddies.
[Prediction: -1 Troll because we know how much Slashdot loves dissenting ideas]
I told Torvalds, you will rue the day, you will rue the day you used BitKeeper, but noooooo
Chris Knight: "Rue the day? Who talks like that??"
Such a good movie
I want to drag this out as long as possible. Bring me my protractor.
OSDL had an agreement with BitMoover, and therefore the contractors they hire must also abide with that agreement.
Which is, of course, the biggest line of bullshit ever. A company does not own its employees. While BitMover is legally in the clear here (the contract is the contract), they're morally in the wrong to have included such a line in the first place.
It's one thing to tell companies you're giving free stuff to "hey, don't develop a competing product". That's cool. But OSDL wasn't developing a competing product. Some guy who worked for them was developing stuff on his own time and OSDL didn't fire him for it. BitMover's agreement basically says "not only can't you develop a competing product, but if you pay anybody who does or offer them any assistance or do anything other than kick the hell out of them, we're through".
Making other companies into your goon squad to prevent competing products from appearing just because you're giving them some free software isn't morally sound. Competition is good, unless you're the one being competed against, right?
Expecting that relationship to actually last, especially in a world where people think software should not only be free as in beer but also free as in speech, was perhaps a bit foolish on all sides, but in no way can you make BitMover out to be the good guy here.
Larry is being a jackass, he probably knows it, and he probably doesn't much care.
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
I bet BitKeeper's CEO or employees use Samba, and I'm sure they love it (as millions do).
Now, I presume *that* reverse engineering was ok, but damn, how could anyone dare rev eng THEIR product...
Go figure.
well, that cuts both ways... how many people worked on the kernel, that wouldn't have if Linus had listened to the people who wanted to keep using something as broken as CVS until some hypothetical distributed open-source version control system got ready for use?
Granted, svn doesn't have some of the cooler distributed coding features, and that's really the pickle for kernel development. But speed really isn't an issue for it, in my experience.
I forget what 8 was for.
Perforce is pretty stable, I like it alot. It sure beats using CVS. ... for now.
It is currently free for open source projects
"If a show of teeth is not enough, bite
They aren't saying, "hey you can't use the current revision anymore, give it back." they just aren't providing free updates anymore. There should be plenty of time to get something together before the next revision becomes overwhelmed with the number of changes in the changelog.
First of all, as someone else said above: "Did you ever consider that he might have got a similar productivity boost by switching to a Free source control system instead of BitKeeper? "
It is dangerous to take a relation as a causality.
But, say it did boost the development. A more appropriate anaology would be some machinery that is used to build a building. The building being Linux (which lacks in your comparison, because when driving a car, you are not working on something collectively). Now, say you have the choice of free machinery, which would be at your disposal forever, but work more slowely, and unfree ones, which work faster.
After a copple of years, you get the finger with the unfree machinery. By then, everyone is used to the machinery, everything is managed according to it, and their is invariably a big cost (and considerable learning curve) in changing to any other machinery. Do you doubt that productivity will suffer because of it? I don't. Will it be worthwile, to have used the other macinery after all? That will depend on various factors, but it sure as hell isn't as clear-cut as in your analogy.
At the end, it might well be that you're indeed better of by using the slow-but-steady machines instead of the fast-but-unreliable ones. As is known already in the IT business, changing to a new platform or whatever - especially when you're users are used to it, applications are build on it, etc. can be prohibitive expensive. Also, you don't actually *know* when or for what reason you will get the finger, do you? So all this is talk 'in hindsight'. If that dude backengineered Bitkeeper much sooner, they might have say 'njet' much sooner too. In that case, say after 6 months, would you still be saying the same thing?
In cases like this, you do *not* know how long it will take to be allowed to use it, or if it is going to be worth the trouble. As with free alternatives, at least you know it will always remain free.
So, in fact, if someone offered me a car that drives 1000 km in a month, but which can be taken away at their will, or I can chose a car that only drives 500 km/month, but remains mine indefinately, I'll chose the latter - as would most sensible people, me thinks.
--- "To pee or not to pee, that is the question." ---
I hope that Linus will select to use the best tool. It may be free or proprietary or anything between. It's is the result that counts!
I'm not a kernel developer, but it seems to me Perens and RMS were right from the start. Good riddance and don't let the door hit your ass on the way out.
grammar-lesson free since 1999. (rescinded - 2005)
You're of course right.
However the intellectual knowledge that you made more progress for a few months is generally overcome by the general suckiness of not having a car anymore.
I have 25k files in my repository and no sign of any slowdown. I'm sure repositories like Mono's are much much larger.
It's true that svn is slower to compute "blame." The developers are working on this. But it's much faster at other operations. Overall, the edge is with svn already.
There are lots of such tools, including CVS, Subversion (SVN), GNU arch, Monotone, Aegis, CVSNT, Darcs, FastCST, OpenCM, Vesta, Superversion, Codeville, Bazaar, Arx, and Bazaar-NG.
- David A. Wheeler (see my Secure Programming HOWTO)
Wow, Linus used BitKeeper?
Linus is Awesome!!!
I wonder what kind of socks he wears, cause I want to wear the same kind. Think of how much better the kernel is due to the fact that Linus wears socks. I wish Linus would be my friend. I wonder what he is doing right now.
Oh wait... I don't give a shit what he is doing or what software he used for "the kernel". He is just another jackass in a sea of programmers who is capable of writing a kernel.
Please Linus... Find another program to help you continue write the "kernel". I don't want to use BSD or spend a whole $100 to get something else.
Or at least mod the better-explaining children up.
BK is dying
So, they're terminating support because OSDL paid someone, who, in his spare time, worked on something competing? How does this infringe on OSDL's license at all?
I'm sorry, but if the Sony came and told me to fire someone because he put a mod chip on his PS/2 at home, I'd tell them to get lost.
It could be said that BitMover's sucess is a result of marketing BitKeeper through open source channels. Forgetting their roots and alienating the market that they used to grow themselves is a serious strategic error.
Watch karma in action in the next couple of years
The reason that it can be true that 1+1 > 2 is that very peculiar nonzero value of the + operator
Woa... what a way to crash and burn!
This Larry guy is phenomenal. He has single handely managed to produce an immense amount of bad will in
the only community that had any motivation to support and push his product in places that actually buy licenses.
Let me guess, the next time a large corporation is going to choose its VCS for a project the LinuxHeads (and there is always one or two) are really going to vote this product down from the choice list.
Prediction 1: Out of business in a year... at most two.
Prediction 2: Most other VCS will improve to fill the void. From what I've seen so far as soon as Arch gets to clean up its command line interface it will wipe out all the others.
Who bloody cares?
Right. What Linus uses is he's own business. It's like the editor wars: my tool is better than yours...
BUT: Linux's main problem has always been the lack of a unified and consistent repository. Unlike the BSD projects, which used CVS from the very start, Linux kernel sources were kept in different SCM systems (at the beginning perhaps even not), so it is now extremely difficult to follow the change history reliably (think SCO law suits etc...).
For someone interested in developer's change history comments and details code changes, Linux kernel sources are a poor resource (despite ChangeLogs). You could always run diff between Linux releases, but you'll still don't have the commit logs. OTOH, the BSD CVS-REPO contains a wealth of useful comments, mistakes to avoid and how they have been resolved etc...
It is now too late for Linux, but nothing would prevent Linus from importing the current sources into CVS (or Subversion), and start from there! This BitKeeper lesson could prove beneficial, if Linus took the right decisions now.
cpghost at Cordula's Web.
Obvious does not always equal right.
;)"
"PS. Don't bother telling me about subversion. If you must, start reading up on "monotone". That seems to be the most viable alternative, but don't pester the developers so much that they don't get any work done. They are already aware of my problems
Akarsz Magyar Gentoo fórumot? Akkor
That's a good point and a good concern. But the other big OS makers (Microsoft and Apple) do it all the time - it's just their final version isn't free.
.\.\att Clare
I only steal on my own free time. They can't fire me for that.
What, exactly, was stolen here? Not BitKeeper, it was freely available.
Either this guy did one of two things:
-Reverse engineered it to make his own product interoperable with it, which is not only 100% legal but a very useful thing to do from BitMover's perspective. More software that works with their stuff means more people buying their stuff to use with this software.
-Wrote his own software with features similar to those in BitKeeper, which can in no possible way be considered "stealing". Considering that most of those features were probably the ones more useful for the OSS community, and that most of those features in BitKeeper were suggested by the OSS community (as Larry himself says in TFA), then they're not even BitMover's original feature ideas in the first place.
No, this is a gut reaction by BitMover and Larry. They're not thinking it through all the way because they don't have the open source mindset. They were using Linus and the popularity factor to promote their product, they think that they've milked that cash cow for all they can, and now they use an excuse to end that support because it's not as profitable for them to keep up the pretense anymore. Simple decision there.
Bitmover is not an open source company and they don't understand open source principles. All the rest is just side issues.
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
to this: :^) bwahahahahaha
m e.asp
http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/productinfo/
of course for the TRULY EVIL, they COULD use this:
http://www.serena.com/Products/professional/vm/ho
This short little page does absolutely nothing to give you the notion of exactly HOW TERRIBLY AWFUL PVCS really is.
On my whiteboard:
"PVCS, the 'S' is for Suks"
They Live, We Sleep
Linus: "Don't bother telling me about subversion. If you must, start reading up on "monotone". That seems to be the most viable alternative, but don't pester the developers so much that they don't get any work done. They are already aware of my problems ;)"
I would've suggested Arch or Monotone. It's nice to see the Kernel Team not wasting a minute and it gives me a little ego stroking seeing that Linus makes nearly the same choice that I would have. And I've only started using VC on a regular basis recently.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
>>Just because you are too daft to figure out a viable business model doesn't mean it can't be done.
Errm... show me one.
Don't quote the "IBM paying for drivers" crap.
How many of us can subcontract to IBM to write device drivers FFS? Not many - and all those positions are filled.
Independent software firms need to develop and sell applications!
They can't afford to develop and give away significant applications and hope to pick up a few crumbs by charging for support, patches and extra features (that many customers will find any excuse to go without in my experience).
I think it's YOU that doesn't get it.
Had you read the article, you would have noticed that McVoy said he will not sell a license to Linus as long as Linus is working for OSDL.
Consider it in the following way: there is this company and the bunch of geeks. The company doesn't really trust that the geeks won't try and copy its product. On the other hand, the geeks don't really trust the company not to take away the tool that sits in the very base of what they're doing.
This is like the scene with a bunch of cops and a bunch of mafia guys in the same room pointing guns at each other (a-la True Romance): it's a question of when, not whether, someone will wink first.
Developing an alternative, even through reverse engineering, is far from "IP theft". Thinking that you have a perpetual right to monopoly and ownership of your customers is basically what's wrong with all you anti-FOSS zealots.
1:Proprietary product comes to OSS.
2:Proprietary product that OSS depends on, for whatever reason.
3:OSS basically copies proprietary program.
4:Proprietary withdraws from OSS market.
5:OSS now has copies of proprietary product.
Yeah! I can see why OSS will be a growth market. Embrace, and extend, OSS style.
Linus should talk with Microsoft about moving to Microsoft Team Server. I'm sure they'd be glad to cut a deal. Very, very glad ...
No data, no cry
The parent poster is absolutely correct giving the key reason why the current version of svn is not good enough for the kernel developers.
Some observations to think about:
Version control is a service to software developers - thus commercial companies are willing to pay for somebody to set up a version control repository for them.
A version control system for a company needs to be reliable - RAID storage, high availablity, redundant everything. Such hardware is very high margin (read: profitable).
Writing version control software takes experience in both using VCS and writing VCS.
It also takes programmers. Lots of programmers.
IBM makes high availability hardware. IBM sells computing services. IBM has lots of experience in using VCS. IBM has written their own VCS. IBM has lots of programmers.
IBM is into Linux.
www.eFax.com are spammers
Well maybe, but maybe not. Linus liked Bitkeeper, because it was the right tool for the job. The only thing that has changed is the price. So there are two choices...
1: switch tools.
2: BUY LEGAL COPIES OF BITKEEPER.
Linus can continue to use Bitkeeper on Bitmovers terms by cutting them a check and signing their G.D. EULA.
But somehow....I don't thing this is going to happen.
"The open source position on this one is not outrageous: they want a client which can't be taken away from them."
Well if this was truely an ideological issue, instead of a practical one? Then OSS would have stuck with CVS, UNTIL it had something that couldn't "be taken away from them."
Nvidia Drivers
Wireless Drivers
Java
Flash
MP3
PDFs
For an OSS fan Larry McVoy sure fall prey to some of the misconceptions that surround OSS. How can he see seperate and independant attempts to recreate the functionality of his sotware as "reverse engineering" and how dare he view OSS developers as one great colllective, with a group mind.
OSS is about choice, and since he is anti-choice then he is no OSS fan. He can rot on the pile of proprietry crap along with SCO.
I make a living modifying GPL software. It isn't rocket science. You just charge people for your time. Nothing in RMS's philosophy is opposed to the "Pay for time" system.
Now, I do agree that RMS is a nut, but his ultimate goal is OK. He just tends to pick stupid battles, over which I say "I will say Linux if I want, thank you very much, as last I checked, Fedora was not a GNU project. If I use Debian, I will call it GNU/Linux since that *is* affiliated with GNU."
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
BitKeeper is largely based on Teamware anyway, though Teamwaer doesn't have changesets. Sun completely botched marketing of Teamware and it is end of lifed. The big problem of course is that Sun dislikes the GPL even more than Larry McVoy, so the only terms they would make it available under, if they would do it at all, is the CDDL. That might be good enough as it is unlikely that you would want to use any of the code elsewhere.
I've known a lot of ex-military guys and they're all the same way. I admire their confidence and leadership skills, but they think the real world works just like a military academy. They're wrong. I've seen too many businesses led by military guys fail. They don't understand there is freedom of choice in the real world. There is democracy, capitalism, and sovern countries with their own sets of laws. The real world is not a closed environment like what they experienced during military training.
"If Commodore Amiga's operating system had been Free Software, the chances are I'd still be using it today. It would, by now, have a community of developers built around it who would have kept it up to date, ported it to commodity hardware, etc."..."Why did I need to switch from AmigaOS? 'cos it was set in stone. There'd never likely be an update, and even if there was one, I'd be unlikely to obtain it, and it's unlikely it'd ever move forward very far."
You're forgetting that what made the Amiga the Amiga, and not just a bunch of code, was the synergy between the code and the hardware. That's one of the reasons the Apple's work so well. You may have had the Amiga code running on commodity hardware, but it wouldn't be Amiga.
Time to halt all kernel development, speed up subversion and make it better than bitkeeper!
Well if you could redirect effort as easily as that it would be dramatic
There are a few essential tools that led to the GNU/Linux/OSS revolution; make, gcc etc. Over due to do it again!
A blog I run for the wealth
So Larry is trying to teach us FREE SOFTWARE guys a lesson. Great. In one swoop he has:
1. Shown us why "free as in beer" software is bad.
2. Forced us to focus on developing a FREE SOFTWARE competitor to his product.
Look for bitkeeper/linux to thrive now that a group of gifted developers is forced to come up with an alternative product. And dont forget about the coders that will contribute just because of the wy this went down. And I am sure that we will not work on a windows server/client.
Look for this lesson in bussiness books in 5 years as to how to guarantee your successfull company tanks.
It's not the size of your stack that matters, it's how you push and pop
In BitMover's defence, I have to say they DID say that this is what would happen, right from the start. This isn't a spur-of-the-moment decision.
On the other hand, precisely because it was pointed out that this would be the result, a lot of people (myself included) argued that BitKeeper was not a sound choice. There were benefits, sure, but the risks involved were high enough to make it very uncertain those benefits were really worth it.
The time it will take to export, then import, the files from one system to another, not just for one person but for every kernel developer, many of the mega-patch maintainers, AND for every developer in every collection of projects that use BitKeeper because the kernel does.... On top of that, with commercial vendors considering staying with BK, we'll now have the added problems of having version control gateways to port between systems.
From previous discussions on Slashdot, Arch seems to be the better system for something like the Linux kernel. I've not used it enough to be able to offer an informed opinion, only the opinions as I have been informed of them. The only thing I've heard against Arch is the primary maintainer, but I've heard similar complaints about OpenBSD too and there is no question about OpenBSD's quality.
I will also agree that pragmatism on a long-term project isn't just about a day or even a year. If the pragmatism card is to be played, it has to be played on the timescale the kernel exists on.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
One of the arguments that people like me make in favor of open source is that you get the ability to be perpetually free of licensing fees and tracking expenses. This means that you have more resources that can be better used elsewhere, and if your needs are not extravegant, you can usually only pay for support and assistance. If your needs are unusual or unmet, you can always pay for the needed features or impliment them yourself.
In essence, open source is a better way to spread the cost of development. It does this by placing a premium on freedom and ownership, as a Neocon might say....
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
BitMover's core problem has nothing to do with supporting Linux for free. Their problem is that they absolutely refuse to compete on price for commercial business. I really wanted to use BitKeeper when I convinced by employer that VSS was destroying productivity,however, BitMover was totally unwilling to match the price of Perforce. End of story. We are a perforce shop now, and probably always will be. They could have had an extra $15,000 per year now, and more over time as our development team grows, just by being competitive, and they turned it down. The 'cost of sales' was practically nil as well since I found them (I had worked on Sun's Teamware, the precursor to Bitkeeper so I already knew about the product). It would have taken 1 sales day to close the deal. I willing to bet that scenario has played out dozens, if not hundreds of times. Everybody would use bitkeeper if the price was right. It isn't, so they don't.
But, if they don't, there's always PVCS or these guys.
Kind of curious, can't Linus stay with the (free) version he is using right now? Nobody seems to consider that. Otherwise back to CVS like the rest of us.
"Does any vendor of a commercial product have a moral high ground to complain when a competitor appears?"
Your statement assumes that all forms of competition are equal. If a competitor copied my code (Pear PC) and put it under another name (Cherry PC) then that form of competition is wrong.
"And whose problem is it if they are trying to charge money for something other will do for free?"
That's all fine and dandy, as long as the OSS community thinks the consequences of such a position all the way through.
The consequences of the above is that NO proprietary product will be released for the Linux market. That means no Photoshop. It also means that codecs take longer to arrive, and that drivers become scarce.
The classic "Us verses Them". Interesting to see who will win that, and how many will be hurt.
I suggest that the guys from Perforce Software stop paying to run ads on Slashdot, as it's obviously going to be a long, long time before any open source developer touches a proprietary version control system again, even if it is free-as-in-beer...
As an Apple customer I've obviously seen some pretty user-hostile moves directed at me, but BitMover have taken user hostility to a whole new level. Way to go, guys!
Now, can we just fix the +silly!--filename requirements in Arch? Thanks...
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
For reasons stated by most of the replies, the analogy is just plain dumb.
Software is intangible, it does not require constant resupply.
The stupid analogy made slightly less stupid should be: Did your grocery ever offer you free bread and milk, but then asked for it back because he thought you were planning to start selling bread and milk in your own store too?
Akarsz Magyar Gentoo fórumot? Akkor
Used it for an AMD project. Simply adding in the boost libaries slowed it so bad, I had to take them back out again.
He pointed out that as a long-time open source fanatic and the CEO of BitMover, "we represent as open-source friendly a commercial organization as you are *ever* going to see", cautioning that the events that have caused BitMover to phase out its free product could also result in other companies never even bothering to make products available on Linux.
That's OK--we don't need companies with that kind of business model for commodity applications.
"back at Sun they had a saying 'it's the apps, stupid'.
Yes, and by following Sun's advice, you can run your business into the ground just like Sun is doing. You see, trying to compete against commodity software is stupid. Java-like systems have become a commodity, and so have BitKeeper-like systems. Sun, at least, figured it out for OpenOffice.
Which meant that all the 'my OS is better than your OS' rhetoric was nothing compared to having more applications on your platform than the other guy's platform.
We have enough applications on Linux, thank you very much, including probably a dozen version control systems that are pretty good. One of them (maybe Subversion) will now end up being used for kernel development, and as a result, it will receive enough attention to become truly competitive with BitKeeper.
Linus's decision to use BitKeeper for Linux, unfortunately, prevented that from happening earlier, which condemned a lot of secondary users of open source version control tools to using less mature tools than they otherwise would have. I hope Linus learned a lesson from this as well: eat open source dog food--it may be painful in the short term, but in the long term, it helps the whole community.
"I make a living programming free software! People pay me to implement features and apps that they want!"
But they don't have to! And THAT's the point. Don't confuse "can", for "will".*
*Granted reduced interdependencies is nice, but let's not think that we're going to get a utopia out of it.
Actually, I sometimes still find myself having to re-invent the wheel because all the open source wheels are square or weigh 3 tons. The basic idea is good, though...
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
One problem with subversion is that it stores all its data in a DB. If that DB gets corrupted, you're FUCKED. Repair tools are rudimentary at best, and when I had my DB corruption with it no matter what I tried I could not restore.
Another example was IN CONTROL being bought by their main competitor, then the product killed with no migration path, leaving me with all my personal organization data in a dead application.
.NET, and as an added bonus it'll let them make their code run on Mac and Linux too. (I submitted that to Slashdot as a story but it was rejected, I guess availability of RealBasic applications doesn't matter to Linux.)
Or Adobe killing PageMill, without offering anything comparable my wife could use to update her web site.
Or Apple killing the Newton, leaving me with all my personal organizer data in a dead product.
Or Corel killing WordPerfect for the Mac, leaving people with thousands of documents and no easy way to convert them to a supported product.
Incidentally, stranded VB6 developers can get a free REALbasic license rather than being forced to migrate to
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
You're basically restating what he's said. Yes both sides are doing what's in their interests (that's human nature). HOWEVER the problem is that the "lone wolf" nature of OSS is the opposite of what's needed to function in an interdependent society. Great if you want to build a software commune, bad if you want to build something more complicated.
What this amounts to is that BitKeeper used Linux as a marketing trick to gain acceptance and recognition for their product, as well as to get bugs out and features for large-scale develoment in, and now that they have gotten what they want, they are dumping their free tool and focusing on making money.
In fact, this sort of behavior isn't uncommon. Open source projects should be careful about letting themselves be used in this way. All the marketing, bug reporting, and feature requests you contribute to a vendor are very valuable; they could be going to an open source project instead.
Think of this in terms of money: if someone gave you a million dollars to spend on a tool, would you contribute it to a commercial company for a three year license for their tool, or would you spend it on an open source project to help develop a free alternative? I think if you really believe that open source is a viable approach to software development, you should choose the latter.
Errr... terribly sorry. I guess this is what happens when ironic replies remain long after the stupid one gets modded to oblivion. %)
Akarsz Magyar Gentoo fórumot? Akkor
The Mac and Windows operating systems can't keep track with all those thousands of bees!
Darcs is nice, but it doesn't (yet) perform well enough for regular kernel development. The patch reordering algorithms work by loading the entire history in memory, which does not scale well to large trees.
Darcs is, at the moment, a nice system for smaller projects.
on the other hand, svk does support distributed repositories. and it works with subversion.
RCS and CVS are definitely non-starters.
Found these links when I was doing a websearch on monotone and other CMS systems.
Problems with BK's license
A critique of the license.
And a nastygram of BK to the subversion group.
While it may or may not have your personal favorite, this page compares the features of 13 different source control systems. I found it via this page that compared five of the more popular open-source systems.
i'm downloading all of the platforms now!
If they're looking for a replacement I hear Visual SourceSafe is supposed to be quite good.
Apple wrote a utility to stress test UFS and debugged the code for Darwin and the bug fixes made it into FreeBSD.
Actually, I think he did.
Here's what Linus had to say about it today.
Did your grocery store ever offer you free bread and milk? Did they imply that this would be an ongoing offer? Was there ever a concern that your household was becoming dependant on that free bread and milk? And once you did become dependant on that free bread and milk, did your grocery store now demand the 4 bucks because they discovered one of your household members was learning how to bake bread?
If I decided to make my own bread and milk for free from scratch, no store in the world - or decent human being would threaten me for making a copy of theres with lawsuits for copyright infringement or charge me for copying - but this is exactly what BitKeeper is doing today. It's bullshit morality, and it not only stupidly treats something that is tangable like something that isn't, but it treats it in a way that is even MORE restrictive than physical things.
Since free (not as in beer) software has started, it must be behind over 100Bln in economic activity alone - yet people still can't pull their head out and see who'se being pro business and commerce, and who'se being pro cartel, monopoly, and anti free makret. God dammit, information has no natural limit in supply and demand, it's the services, support, and things that go with it that do. Bottom line, people who can't provide these seem to want to controll the information, people who can don't. The former simply doesn't belong in the information age.
Appearantly what Linus was looking at a few hours ago was something called Monotone. It's over at Freshmeat, but I've never heard of it before. (Surprise! HOW many projects are there these days?)
Does anyone know anything about Monotone?
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
"The majority of paid programmer get paid by a company that does not sell software. There will always be jobs for programmers like me. I work for a fortune 500 that has nothing to do with the Tech industry and has never sold one line of code. I get paid to develop in-house applications that are for use only by the company. Even if all commercial software went away and it all became GPL'ed/LGPL'ed, there will be plenty of jobs for programmers to work for companies making custom software to help companies to perform their day-to-day business"
Which is just a long winded way of agreeing with the poster. Companies can't compete directly with GPL. Your company sells something that may indirectly depend on GPL (runs the machines), but it doesn't compete directly with GPL (sells digital-resistant physical widgets). The source of your income comes from a non-GPL source (people buying physical GPL-resistant widgets). So once again people can't make money directly based upon GPL foundations, but indirectly from a non-GPL stream, layed on top. And as pointed out "uisms" are about extremes, not getting along.* Fortunately, physics has something to say about that.
*Imagine the GNU ideology in a "replicator" based society.
I mean, the BSD projects keep their *entire* system - kernel + userland + ports framework - in CVS repositories, and this seems to have worked very well for them. Is there something fundamentally different about the Linux development philosopy, or in the way that Linus works, that would make CVS unsuitable?
First, I'm very glad to see you recommend a free software program to do the job. I'm also glad to hear you point out the irony in the movement you helped start--here is an instance where pushing aside software freedom is not practical. I believe there are many more instances like this.
For those of you who don't get what I'm addressing, it's ironic that someone involved in starting the Open Source Initiative and the open source movement is telling you that this decision to go with BitKeeper was not practical. The open source movement, in its desire to talk to business, dismisses software freedom and makes a pitch on "solid pragmatic grounds" (according to the opensource.org website). This movement does not mind adopting proprietary software in much the same way as Linus Torvalds recommends that we do--use proprietary software when it is convenient because proprietary software is slightly less efficient than an "open source" program to do the same job. Torvals' message sets a very bad example and people would be far more wise to demand their software freedom.
Digital Citizen
Right now in Subversion you can diff against the trunk like so
svn diff|merge|etc "http://myrepository/trunk"
against a branch
svn diff|merge|etc "http://myrepository/branch"
or between an aribtrary trunk and branch
svn diff|merge|etc "http://myrepository/trunk" "http://myrepository/branch"
but you can't AFAIK do the following
or svn diff|merge|etc "http://linuscorp/trunk" "http://ibmcorp/branch"
and there in lies the problem. Without this inter-repository ability it makes it difficult for IBM or Fujitsu or Redhat to maintain their repository and Linus to maintain his respository and merge and patch between them.
Linus and Andrew need to pick one. Once that is done, development on it will increase dramatically. I'd wager dozens of people would want to work on it knowing that it's used for kernel development. Get a couple quick fixes in, get some feedback from Linus and Company, and keep at it.
I bet there's a quick increase on development for a few of the Free version control systems in the days leading up to a decision as well.
(Doh! I posted this as anonymous just a sec ago by mistake)
Right now in Subversion you can diff against the trunk like so
svn diff|merge|etc "http://myrepository/trunk"
against a branch
svn diff|merge|etc "http://myrepository/branch"
or between an aribtrary trunk and branch
svn diff|merge|etc "http://myrepository/trunk" "http://myrepository/branch"
but you can't AFAIK do the following
or svn diff|merge|etc "http://linuscorp/trunk" "http://ibmcorp/branch"
and there in lies the problem. Without this inter-repository ability it makes it difficult for IBM or Fujitsu or Redhat to maintain their repository and Linus to maintain his respository and merge and patch between them.
The one option no one has mentioned here is actually buying BitKeeper. What is so wrong about spending money on a commercial piece of software if it saves you time and money?
In this case BitKeeper is head and shoulders above CVS (haven't tried subversion yet) for managing something as complex as a kernel, and therefore should have monetary value.
I like open source and do use various software packages where it makes sense, but I also use a lot of commercial software where it makes sense. Recently I've seen more and more software developers hammering on commercial software vendors when its those vendors who HIRE PROGRAMMERS JUST LIKE YOU! The number of software engineers employeed by commercial software product companies vs. open source companies has got to be 1,000,000 to 1 at least.
I don't pretend to know the details of this case, but in general, few people seem to be putting themselves in the situation of running a small software company such as the one I work for. If you let an organization use your stuff for free, and then they tried to reverse engineer it in order to give away your software for free, and putting you out of business in the process, wouldn't you cut 'em off?
RMS Kaffee: I want the thruth!
Linus Jessep: You cant handle the truth! We live in a world with walls. And those walls have to be guarded by men with guns. Who's gonna do it? [..] I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain myself to a man who rises and sleeps under the blanket of the very freedom I provide, then questions the manner in which I provide it! I'd rather you just said thank you and went on your way. Otherwise, I suggest you pick up a weapon and stand a post. Either way, I don't give a damn what you think you're entitled to!
RMS Kaffee: Did you order a Code Red Bitkeeper?
Linus Jessep: (quietly) I did the job you sent me to do.
RMS Kaffee: (loudly) Did you order the code red bitkeeper?
Linus Jessep: You're goddamn right I did!!
So instead of developing easy to use software that doesn't need support, people should really develop useful but hard to use software that has support costs. Yeah, sounds good.
Its time Linus and free software projects drop BitKeeper. Boycott them.
The question is:
what are the choices for Linus and other free software projects to migrate to?
I was curious what Linux had to say about this, so from the LKML:
;). That hasn't been working out, and as a result, the kernel team
;)
Date Wed, 6 Apr 2005 08:42:08 -0700 (PDT)
From Linus Torvalds
Subject Kernel SCM saga..
Ok,
as a number of people are already aware (and in some cases have been
aware over the last several weeks), we've been trying to work out a
conflict over BK usage over the last month or two (and it feels like
longer
is looking at alternatives.
[ And apparently this just hit slashdot too, so by now _everybody_ knows ]
It's not like my choice of BK has been entirely conflict-free ("No,
really? Do tell! Oh, you mean the gigabytes upon gigabytes of flames we
had?"), so in some sense this was inevitable, but I sure had hoped that it
would have happened only once there was a reasonable open-source
alternative. As it is, we'll have to scramble for a while.
Btw, don't blame BitMover, even if that's probably going to be a very
common reaction. Larry in particular really did try to make things work
out, but it got to the point where I decided that I don't want to be in
the position of trying to hold two pieces together that would need as much
glue as it seemed to require.
We've been using BK for three years, and in fact, the biggest problem
right now is that a number of people have gotten very very picky about
their tools after having used the best. Me included, but in fact the
people that got helped most by BitKeeper usage were often the people
_around_ me who had a much easier time merging with my tree and sending
their trees to me.
Of course, there's also probably a ton of people who just used BK as a
nicer (and much faster) "anonymous CVS" client. We'll get that sorted out,
but the immediate problem is that I'm spending most my time trying to see
what the best way to co-operate is.
NOTE! BitKeeper isn't going away per se. Right now, the only real thing
that has happened is that I've decided to not use BK mainly because I need
to figure out the alternatives, and rather than continuing "things as
normal", I decided to bite the bullet and just see what life without BK
looks like. So far it's a gray and bleak world
So don't take this to mean anything more than it is. I'm going to be
effectively off-line for a week (think of it as a normal "Linus went on a
vacation" event) and I'm just asking that people who continue to maintain
BK trees at least try to also make sure that they can send me the result
as (individual) patches, since I'll eventually have to merge some other
way.
That "individual patches" is one of the keywords, btw. One thing that BK
has been extremely good at, and that a lot of people have come to like
even when they didn't use BK, is how we've been maintaining a much finer-
granularity view of changes. That isn't going to go away.
In fact, one impact BK ha shad is to very fundamentally make us (and me in
particular) change how we do things. That ranges from the fine-grained
changeset tracking to just how I ended up trusting submaintainers with
much bigger things, and not having to work on a patch-by-patch basis any
more. So the three years with BK are definitely not wasted: I'm convinced
it caused us to do things in better ways, and one of the things I'm
looking at is to make sure that those things continue to work.
So I just wanted to say that I'm personally very happy with BK, and with
Larry. It didn't work out, but it sure as hell made a big difference to
kernel development. And we'll work out the temporary problem of having to
figure out a set of tools to allow us to continue to do the things that BK
allowed us to do.
Let the flames begin.
Linus
Kernel SCM saga...
What is there so hard to understand about that?
Maybe it's a US thing, with employees of US companies not being allowed to do their own thing in their spare time.
In Europe though, an employer's claim over what an employee does ends when the employee retires for the day.
For all those who have nothing better to do than to read /. at work, here is the complete thread on LK which got all this started:
[BK] upgrade will be needed
But, noooooooo. The greed of the Linux community trumped even that.
I don't understand that remark at all, unless by "greed" you mean "intense desire for survival".
The community knew that it was operating at the mercy of an individual's whim. For the community to try to buy itself some insurance is only natural.
It's the greed of that company that is remarkable. Despite reaping enormous commercial benefit from the community's involvement with its commercial product, it wasn't satisfied with "Oh well, that was good while it lasted, and we have earned a good reputation", but instead they pulled the plug. That's greed, quite apart from being myopic.
Idiotic move, now they'll go down instead of living on their past laurels.
The source and it's metadata is plain old ASCII. No matter how this ends up, at the end of the day there still is a code tree anyone with most any reasonable machine can work with, improve on, etc...
Linus took advantage of a great tool and got some work done. Now that's over, so everyone moves on. Big deal. New tools will either be crafted, or will be made avaliable. In the end, nothing really changes.
Anyone thinking hard about where their data is stored and who they have to pay to access it should be looking at this for some much needed guidence, IMHO.
Good for OSS, good for Open Standards (which still get far too little attention.)
By the way, lots of big companies are starting to say "open" now and even use the buzzwords (xml, etc..), yet you still have to buy stuff to make actual use of your data for anything other than the most elementary viewing purposes.
WE NEED TO DO A LOT MORE WORK DETAILING EXACTLY WHAT OPEN MEANS.
Blogging because I can...
I would have accepted that since the needs of the FOSS development and comerical development are going in two seprate directions is reason enough to phase out BitMover's development of the free version of BitKeeper.
In fact, I would have praised BitMover for being willing to release a FOSS client (despite the fact that the announcement doesn't make it clear if the license will be GPL compatible... and given BitMover's history, it probably will not be).
But then he does a 180, goes on the attack, and even issues outright lies...
Uh. NO! The most Free Software/Open Source friendly commercial organization we are *ever* going to see is Trolltech. Even I B M has been more friendly than BitMover has.
There are no bad apples in the Marines?! I recall a recent court-martial of a marine for the death of Nagen Sadoon Hatab. The guy was dragged by his neck and left to die! And despite that, the punishment of the Marine was far from immediate.
Reverse-engineering BitKeeper seems far from being compariable to costing people their lives. And BitMover's CEO seem unwilling to let time tell if the FOSS community is accepting of the results. I'm aware of OSS developers that have given presentations using MS-PowerPoint despite the availablity of OpenOffice. The OSS community votes with what it decides to use and improve. McVoy seems unwilling to wait and expects results even faster than even the Marines can provide.
At one point he is damning the OSDL for reverse-engineering and then he seems to end with validifing the OSDL's actions. When all is said and done, BitMover NEVER EVER provided a guarantee of providing for the OSS community. The threat of terminating the free license has alway existed. In the case of developers of the Subversion project, the termination of the free license already had occured. And while terminating the license for working on a specific OSS project, Larry still claims to be involved with the most OSS friendly commerical organizations. Maybe Larry just isn't aware that Trolltech accepts that there are cases where Gtk developers use Qt driven applications to help their development.
And also while claiming to be the most OSS friendly commerical organization, BitMover's CEO seems to be willing to use the same breath to confirm that BitMover can and will pull Linus' access to BitKeeper at any time they wish.
For someone trying to avoid backlash, he sure is happy to make an ass of himself.
Bottom line: BitMover has gone from a company that I would recommend to one that is on my blacklist (and some of my recommendations to companies have resulted in the sale of BitKeeper commerical licenses).
Sorry, but there is nothing unreasonable in this so-called "nastygram." How is this any different than refusing to train your replacement full-time "temp" at work? You can use our product just don't compete with it,I don't see what is so unfair about it.
Your CPU is not doing anything else, at least do something.
I have to say, as a developer I see this as a resounding failure on the part of the open source community to self regulate. I quite regularly talk to software organisations that would like to open source part of their product or a less feature rich version. The reasons for this are usually altruistic...but at the same time, they don't want to have their whole business taken away from them and end up in the poor house...so they err on the side of caution.
Bitkeeper offered their free (yes I know) version for open source development. They spent a lot of money developing proprietary, innovative and unique IP and, in support of the open source development community, decided to let them use it at no charge (if they wanted to). The open source community, in contrary to the licence agreement, tried to steal that IP and put bitkeeper out of business.
I see so many posts saying "don't want to honour the GPL, don't use open source"...how about the open source community practice what it preaches?! They accepted bitkeeper and had a massive surge in productivity...they accepted the license, accepted the benefits but didn't honour the agreement...something the community is always complaining about with other companies.
The reverse engineering efforts show in no uncertain terms that the open source community can't be trusted to their honour. That they put their beliefs about everything needing to be open above their word. Their word is worth nothing.
This is a sad, sad day for business/open source relations. The efforts to steal bitkeepers technology is dispicable.
I'm a developer who regular assists on mailing lists and has contributed not an insignificant number of bug fixes to open source products, but I also want a job in 5 years that pays me more than praise, and I see this as an open act of aggression against a commercial entity that did nothing more than offer free use of their IP to help speed up development.
Since Bitkeeper is not BSD either.
Bitkeeper is just a commercial product with an exception for a specific case. This exception, as we have seen now, can be withdrawn just like that.
It proves only that a free license is important. Both GPL and BSD are free licenses, each with advantages and disadvantages. But at least, both are free.
It is not necessary to drag in the old BSD vs. GPL discussion here; the issue is completely different.
Whatever project Torvalds settles on is going to receive a tremendous boost in attention. Attention of the best sort, hordes of very tech-savvy open source developers.
The result will be a massive bout of stabilization and filling in of gaps for that project.
The Bottom Line, Cosmic Goodness for the whole world.
Personally I'll be watching this story _very_ closely. We need to shift of CVS soonish, and you can bet whatever Linus chooses will immediately become top candidate.
canonical is rewriting it in python for portability to windows. Their new version has sane naming conventions and a sane command set.
I suggest anyone who's looking for "something better than CVS" to take a tour through the monotone documentation.
These docs are just excellent (reading is believing!) and provide a great intro to the monotone src control system. Monotone is decentral (a bit like bitkeeper), keeps the repository in a single file (yay!), does 3-way merges and, on top, the syntax appears to be bearable!
Try darcs or arch for a day and you'll understand why I had to make that last part bold...
I'm giving it a testride right now and according to this rumor Linus has it on his radar, too...
"Stop impugning Linus' objectivity unless you have some evidence that can demonstrate his bias. Otherwise, I'll give him the benefit of the doubt. And again you make your false assertion. What Linus chooses going forward proves nothing."
What, he ain't human?
As much as I valor Linus and his accomplishments, it is equally foolish to set him on a pedestal. The chance that he's totally immune to the most common human psychological effects and social behaviour seems rather farfetched.
People that make a decision and stick to it for years will have trouble acknowledging that it was a mistake after all. And especially when it's not a clear cut deal, one might think it was not that bad a thing after all - and that wouldn't necessarily even be malvolent or consciously lying about it, mind you.
"And your logic is seriously, fatally flawed in the last two lines I quoted from you. First, you falsely assume that the best technological choice must be proprietary."
I did no such thing. If you are going to attack my logic, please do not use strawman-attacks. It is more then clear that even today, the free alternatives are not yet to the point of some properietary systems (I believe Linus himself stated something like this only 4 months ago). Thus, my reasoning is correct: *IF* he really thinks it was all worth the trouble, and he stays true to his technological-superiority-before-anything-else viewpoint, then logic dictates he should use it again.
"The technologically superior system this time might be open source."
That is possible, but doubtfull. As far as I've seen, Linus has always - even fairly recently - maintained that the free alternatives are worse, not better. But in any case, my assertion wasn't that open source is inherently less superior, it was the logical conclusion that properietary systems which are superior (this is not a statement they are superior by definition, but it adds the condition to it, btw) should again be taken, if Linus thinks it is so beneficial.
"Second, and even worse, you assert that if choosing a proprietary system was a good decision this time, than it has to be a good decision this time. This is foolish."
See above. The foolishness is due in large part because you misinterpret what I say. Seen the if statement and the conditions therein, my reasoning and conclusion is fully justified.
"The largest benefit in choosing a proprietary system last time was the structural changes it made to the development process. According to Linus, it made them much more productive and it is very unlikely that *any* source management system, whether proprietary or not, will be able to produce a similar gain in efficiency."
I'm not very impressed by your counterarguments. Saying that that was the largest benefit, even when taken at face value, is justification in hindsight. And it's not really the actual reason neither, as you are well aware. He didn't say: "we'll take BK because it will force me to organise things differently", he just stated that it was technologically superior.
Furthermore, say he had chosen an other alternative, then what? Good chance he would say just the same; that he was forced to do things differently. This is an argument that is always true; the moment you manage things differently, one can say it is different. As for the 'better'; that is hindsight, as I already pointed out. Maybe some other (free) system would have been better then the cvs of sourceforge too, who knows. You should know how worthless it is, statistically spoken, to claim something has been proven to be 'better', when the sample of comparitative studies or experiments are extremely small. 'Better' is a comparsion; better then what? He hasn't actually worked with anything else as an alternative (apart from the old cvs). If you use hindsight to prove how things are better compared with others, you should at least do the same (in hindsight) of other systems as well.
"What Linus chooses this time in no way affects whether what
--- "To pee or not to pee, that is the question." ---
I guess freedom is actually way more important than function now isn't it....
While I may argue that this is true... The real issue here is that too often engineers forget that freedom is an aspect of function, and a very powerful one. It's not just what the tool can do now, but also what you are allowed to do and how that will affect you in the future.
This is why I get so annoyed by people who say "I don't care what license it uses; I just want to use the best tool for the job!" Well guess what: the license is going to affect the suitability for the job whether you care about it or not. So by not caring about the license you are neglecting your job. This is just another example.
The enemies of Democracy are
Reading this, it seems to have nothing to do with technical advantages of BitKeeper, and everything to do with Linus delegating. Is it true? Where did this part of the article come from?
The point wasn't about users, it was about making money by developing software. If you make good software that doesn't need support as it's intuitive to use and in case of problems has self diagnosis and troubleshooting, where does the money come from if not from support costs?
So Nike gives Michael Jordan a very good pair of tennis. He likes it very much and wears them when playing. As a "favor" to Jordan, Nike would give him a good supply of shoes.
The idea above is so stupid, that I can't still understand why the most famous superstar programmer didn't charge to use a commercial software.
What tool Linus will move to is still being determined
Subversion is pretty good.
I did no such thing.
You said "If it really is all that much beneficial, he (Linus) would obviuosly chose another technological superior, yet proprietary system. I doubt that he will, however." The condition was on whether or not it was beneficial, not whether or not a proprietary system was technologically superior. That was implicit in your statement. If it is possible that this time there is an open source solution that is technologically superior, than his decision to not choose a closed system will tell you nothing. It only is relevant if you assume that there is a technologically superior closed source product.
Sorry, I did not mean to imply that open source source management systems are more advanced than their closed source counterparts. I don't think that is true. I believe Linus' one immutable rule on picking a new source management system was that it still be free-as-in-beer to develop on the Linux kernel, so I was writing under that assumption. BitKeeper is the only closed product that had contorted itself into offering a free version, so as far as I know, the crown goes by default to an open source system.
Saying that that was the largest benefit, even when taken at face value, is justification in hindsight. And it's not really the actual reason neither, as you are well aware. He didn't say: "we'll take BK because it will force me to organise things differently", he just stated that it was technologically superior.
It isn't justification in hindsight. Linus knew at the time that BitKeeper used a distributed rather than a centralized repository model. IIRC, at first he was very skeptical of the model, but Larry won him over (that is a very vague recollection, though). The point is, the workflow for different products is very different and that was a factor Linus was very conscious of in making his decision.
Furthermore, say he had chosen an other alternative, then what? Good chance he would say just the same; that he was forced to do things differently. This is an argument that is always true; the moment you manage things differently, one can say it is different. As for the 'better'; that is hindsight, as I already pointed out.
Okay, now I think you are a troll: you are using interchangeably "different" and "better". He didn't say it was different, he said it was better. Not all changes are better. And what is "cvs of sourceforge"? Also, my understanding is that Linus had tried a few different programs, such as Subversion, arch, etc. I believe he made a standing offer to switch to any open source product that could match a list of key functionality in felt he needed in BitKeeper.
And I disagree with your last statement. It does prove something, provided the same variables are present. For instance, if he thought that propieraty systems are still superior, and
With apologies to Ernest Lawrence Thayer
feel free to repost - everywhere, ad nauseam!
The outlook wasn't brilliant for the student march that night;
The quads were filled with rent-a-cops and not a picket sign in sight;
With Cooney busted for possestion, and Barrows, the riot laws;
A sickly silence fell upon the supporters of The Cause.
A straggling few got up to go, in deep despair. The rest
Clung to that hope which "springs eternal in the human breast;"
They thought, If only Gay Concern could be rallying that mob,
We'd put up even money now, with Concern at the quads.
But Flynn preceded Concern, as did also Jimmy Blake,
And the former was a no-good and the latter was a fake;
Forlorn, that stricken multitude discouraged by the odds,
For there seemed but little chance of Concern's getting to the quads.
But Flynn let fly a bottle, to the wonderment of all,
And Blake, the much despised, set a bomb off in the hall,
And when the dust had lifted and men saw what had occurred,
Jimmy beaned the Dean of Students, while the bombed out library burned.
Then from five thousand throats and more there rose a lusty yell,
It rumbled through the valley, it rattled in the dell,
A Harley roared up from the street, and was tearing up the sod,
And Concern, Gay Concern, was advancing through the quads.
There was ease in Concern's manner as he wheeled into his place;
There was pride in Concern's bearing and a smile on Concern's face,
And when, responding to the cheers, he lightly gave a nod,
No stranger in the crowd could doubt `twas Gay Concern at the quads.
Ten thousand eyes were on him as he gunned the throttle loud;
Five thousand tongues applauded as he signaled to the crowd.
And while the nervous officers grabbed the night sticks from their hips,
Defiance gleamed in Concern's eye, a sneer curled Concern's lip.
And now a can of tear gas came hurtling through the air,
And Concern stood a-watching it in haughty grandeur there,
Close by the haughty Concern, the can unheeded sped --
"That ain't my style," said Concern. "Break it up!" the coppers said.
From the streets, black with people, there went up a muffled roar,
Like the beating of the storm waves on a stern and distant shore.
"Kill them; kill the pigs!" shouted someone from the mob;--
And Concern guns his engine, and wipes-out on the lawn.
With a fist of protest shaking, Concern's visage shone;
He jumped back on his Harley; he bade the march go on;
The Harley takes off through the quads, 'till it hits a vicious bump;
And Concern sails through the air, landing smack upon his rump.
"Fascists!" he screeched, "Capitalist, Imperialist, Racist, Sexist pigs!"
"If I must I'll ride a tricycle, but we'll have this march - you dig?"
They saw his face grow stern and cold; they saw his muscles strain,
And they knew that Gay Concern wouldn't lose that bike again!
The sneer is gone from Concern's lip; his teeth are clenched in hate;
He sniffs with cruel derision as he lets go of the brake.
And now he throws it into first, the clutch he now he lets go,
And now the air is shattered as the bike takes off - alone.
Oh! somewhere there's a campus town where they drum and chant all night.
They protest for the rain forest, and demand the wart-hog's rights.
And somewhere bongs are being passed, and somewhere radicals shout;
But there is no joy at Old State U -- Gay Concern has Wiped Out!
the point is that they are perfectly within their rights.
let's say I'm perfectly in my rights to take your car I sold you back.
You might not want to buy a car from me. It says in the contract I can take it back.
Is anyone saying BitKeeper is beyond its perfect rights? no, just that it sucks. If they were going beyond their rights there would be some legal remedy. As it is the only remedy is to scramble.
-pyrrho
so many here are going back to "Larry is within his rights".
Um. No shit! He totally is within his rights.
That's the problem. Free software is about setting up a different right schema where on guy can't get impetuous or scared and screw over the rest, hold them hostage, etc.
He is within his rights and this is the problem with that type of software. It build dependencies.
It's not just personal decisions, in my experience usually the problem, this very problem but from different causes, comes from a business going out of business or, more often, being bought by a competitor.
Buying a comercial business is like buying the customers... as with Oracle buying PeopleSoft.
This is what I like about open source more than anything else, some reliability. A tool I'm using might grow stale if interest wanes, but it's bound to be smoother and the tool will NOT be taken away and I have avenues to personally extend its life if I want to take on the costs of that in time or money.
Saying "it's Larry's right!" is no different from pointing out that it was Jefferson's property right to sleep with his slave too. So what.
Do you guys know we invented these rights? In the state of nature you get the right to property you can defend yourself... nothing more. Everything else is a human invention and we can chose how to invent or, in this case, re-invent.
-pyrrho
A friend of Larry McVoy's (yes, I'm told he has those) once told me that "Everyone I know who has had anything to do with Larry has eventually either been sued or threatened with a lawsuit by him." By contrast, while Monotone is arguably not yet ready for prime time, Graydon Hoare is a smart, nice, reasonable person who I trust to do the right thing. Thank goodness BitKeeper is out of the picture: maybe now kernel developers like myself who wouldn't touch BK with a 10 foot pole can soon sync their source with Linus' repositories.
This is hardly shocking coming from a commercial software vendor and honestly doesn't really affect things that much. It creates two possible scenarios which both work just fine. 1) an alternative system is found and development goes on as usual. 2) no other alternative can handle the job so BitMover has effectively challenged one of the greatest hackers of all time to develop a replacement which kicks the shit out of BK and development continues as usual.
UNIX: A set of Linux-like operating systems that grew out of an original version written by some guys at a phone company
Gotta try it out. See, slashdot is not only useful to kill time!
As many /. readers know, Perforce is quite an expensive proprietary SCM system. However, several things are quite true about it:
- You can download any SCM software that Perforce makes for free.
- If you download the Perforce server itself, you are limited to two users and two client workspaces, but you get to use the software for free nonetheless.
- There are plenty of fine applications related to SCM that you can get from Perforce, such as graphical interfaces, interactive diff tools, etc. These are free to download and use.
- Here's the best part: Perforce offers free licenses to open source free software projects that it deems worthy. There are a few hoops you have to jump through, and your project actually needs to be open source, but I think Linux qualifies, and I think Perforce would be thrilled to have the whole world know that Linux is developed with Perforce.
Disclaimer: I do NOT work for Perforce, but I do use their product at work, and I can tell you that it is a million times better than CVS, and a hundred thousand times better than any other commercial SCM I've used. I haven't compared it to Subversion yet, because Subversion offers several cool things that Perforce doesn't. But Perforce is a great choice. Screw this Bitkeeper nonsense.You don't lose the right to use the software by breaking the GPL. You lose the rights granted by the GPL, but the right to use it isn't one of those. It's a right you have automatically unless you sign it away, and the GPL just goes out of its way to avoid that.
Also, you only lose the rights on the particular piece of software you were in violation with. If you're distributing other GPL'ed software in compliance with the GPL's terms, you can keep doing it. They're considered separate agreements.
-- . . ramblin' . . .
First off, open source doesn't really need business at this point. It's business that needs open source. Second of all, you're not a "developer". You're a fucking pussy if you don't see that the only people without a job will be your managers and managers of their managers. And maybe marketing people. As baseline software is becoming more and more accessible for regular folks (who can't just go out and drop half a million dollars on software licenses) there will be more and more work for folks who make shit work, provide the "glue" and develop innovative things on FOSS platforms. Development isn't going anywhere just because the OS, office suite and web server are free. To the contrary, by building solutions on top of these free things you can make some money for yourself.
With the following:
:0)
This license explicitly forbids running BitKeeper.
There you frikkin' go, Larry, half of your business is GONE.
Linux is dying
"I'm saying that, like us, he is aware of it and that he is able to factor it into his decisions. I think that is one of the hallmarks of a mature, rational adult. I would like other people to give me the benefit of the doubt that I am capable of objectivity. I am simply extending the same courtesy to Linus."
:-), though difficult to admit, it might well be that I'm not totally objective neither (but then again, I'm not very close to either side of this ideological battle).
This is all very true, and yet, no one - including mature, rational adults - and even people who are excuisitly aware of it (such as shrinks) are truelly capable of 'factoring this in'. In fact, it's a well known principle of psychologists NOT to be their own shrink, or even that of close family or friends, just because it is impossible to be objective. The more you've vested in an idea, decision, people, etc. the more one is inclined to be biased about it. Look at me; the epitome of logical and rational reasoning
'Benefit of the doubt' is a legalese term. In reality I think total objectivity does not exist (perhaps with some rare exeptions like in the mathimatical field), only varying degrees of (im)partiality. On itself, it's not because Linus says it has been beneficial (even when he means it), that it really IS beneficial. Does that mean he *not* right? Not necessarily neither, but it does mean, that you have to keep open the possiblity that he is, consiously or not, exagerating the benefits it gave. (Especially seen in the light that the costs for changing to a new system isn't really known. So how can one truelly say it was beneficial, without knowing the total cost-benefit picture?)
Acknowledging that Linus - or anyone else for that matter - could be biased to some degree, may not fall under 'courtesy', but it does fall under being realistic. Denying that this is a possible factor to be considered, is the NON mature thing to do, IM(H)O.
"You said "If it really is all that much beneficial, he (Linus) would obviuosly chose another technological superior, yet proprietary system. I doubt that he will, however." The condition was on whether or not it was beneficial, not whether or not a proprietary system was technologically superior. That was implicit in your statement."
I'm not following you anymore. Maybe it's because english isn't my native language, but I fail to see how I made something implicit that isn't there. The benefit I'm talking about, is about the technological superior system (which Linus claimed BitKeeper was). He didn't chose BitKeeper because it was free or not, but because it was better technologically speaking. Maybe we disagree on this?
"Okay, now I think you are a troll: you are using interchangeably "different" and "better". He didn't say it was different, he said it was better."
Quote of Linus (dixit yourself):
"In fact, one impact BK has had is to very fundamentally make us (and me in particular) change how we do things."
Thus he DID say it 'changed' things, hence my argument that you can always say that. He also said that it was better, hence my answer about hindsight.
"Second, your logic is again flawed. He might decide to take a less superior but free alternative in this case and be right and he still could be right for making the exact opposite decision in the previous case."
Not when he is still is of the opinion that the technological superior system should be chosen above systems that are ideologically free, but are technologically inferior. (and provided that the technological superior system is a proprietary system, obviously).
"It is simple: technological superiority is not a trinary value."
But it is. Only when you take ideology or other values in it, could you come to another decision then when you decide on it because of the technological superiority (or not). On itself, 'technological superiority' clearly IS a trinary value.
"In the first case, it might be that the difference in technol
--- "To pee or not to pee, that is the question." ---
You can't judge a community based on the actions of one person. Sure OSDL didn't fire the guy, but if it was my company I wouldn't fire him either. His actions may reflect my company, but really it is his own time, and he is probably a valuble employee.
Anyway my original point, I don't judge you based on the "business community" you are part of. Don't judge me similarly if you please.
RMS is behind all this. You know its true. It was a long and costly project but the returns on investment was good.
Now we all know what happens if you trust propietary software.
1. create the enemy
2. make him real evil
3. ???
4. profit!
Just curious.
SVN with FSFS has been great for me, but my repository is very very small.
"Avoid employing unlucky people - throw half of the pile of CVs in the bin without reading them." -- David Brent
Just curious if you trust it yet. :)
"Avoid employing unlucky people - throw half of the pile of CVs in the bin without reading them." -- David Brent
ClearCase.
"Avoid employing unlucky people - throw half of the pile of CVs in the bin without reading them." -- David Brent
You aren't seriously implying that Linux kernel development should be done on CMVC/TeamConnection, are you? Oh, and you might have been thinking ClearCase, but of course, IBM bought ClearCase.
Oh, and of course, ClearCase blows donkeys. That is in addition to it being the wrong SCM model for the kernel team.
What, exactly, are you implying here?
"Avoid employing unlucky people - throw half of the pile of CVs in the bin without reading them." -- David Brent
Also, as a result of open source software, how many people do you think have LOST their jobs? Or will lose their jobs? Let's say Linux is successfull and causes windows and office to become irrelevant in the future. How many hundreds of people will suddenly be out of a job? Replaced by what, 40 paid redhat employees that code? Now repeat with other proprietary software companies.
just read it twice to burn your eyes...
Obviously if you do not wish to use their services, you may reject any email originating from efax.com.
I do, however, like eFax better than ClearCase. With eFax, at least I can shut them up and make them less irritating.
"Avoid employing unlucky people - throw half of the pile of CVs in the bin without reading them." -- David Brent
I'm certainly no vocabularianist, but what does 'mercurialism' mean? For some reason I'm getting vibes of 'mercantalism', and google confirms with a 'Did you mean: mercantilism?' link.
anyone?
-metric
Can't be done. The $x (where x > 0) license for BK contains the same anti-reverse-engineering clause as the $0 license. OSDL can't use BK.
The problem could be "solved" by OSDL firing Linus, but I guess you don't want that.
Watch this Heartland Institute video
"The sentence does not only contain a suggestion about Linus Torwalds' obvious reaction in a situation but also the suggestion that everything (in this domain) that is technologically superior is also proprietary."
:-)
Well, it's not an implicit suggestion about Linus, it's a logical conclusion, provided the premise is used he still prefers technological superior tools above anything that is inferior (albeit free).
As for the apparently implicit 'proprietary is always better' ; this would of course be an absurd statement. I meant to say that he would chose the proprietary system, if it is superior - which, according to himself fairly recently, are still properietary systems *in this instance*. Obviously, I did not mean properietary progs are by definition better, and certainly not that Linus would chose a properietary system, even if an open-source one would be better, because of his stech-sup-before-anything-else view. That would make no sense at all, and be contradictory.
You are probably right that I should have used 'yet possibly' instead of 'yet', but hey, my english ain't that bad as a whole, me thinks.
Anyway, I thought I made it clear in the follow-up responses I posted.
--- "To pee or not to pee, that is the question." ---
I have no idea how happy your 20k file repository would be with that, though. Never actually seen a 20k FSFS repos.
I can tell you this, however. My client has a 20k file ClearCase repository, and it's a DOG.
"Avoid employing unlucky people - throw half of the pile of CVs in the bin without reading them." -- David Brent
Once again Linus is the man. While I immediately flamed even though I really don't know much about the details, he comes out with a cool, rational explanation and has no hard feelings. Everyone who flames anything (including me) needs to think about how Linus handles these things, and realize he is where he is at for a reason.
This is a bet that someone will respond to another posting of mine with something along the lines of "but sadam had nothing to do with 9/11" to which I will respond with, "Hello, post had more than one joke in it." By posting this here, it is proof that I knew I was making two jokes at the time.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
The license for Microsoft's FrontPage (a proprietary webpage editor) prohibits users from using the program to write webpages which disparage Microsoft. BitKeeper's license once said that it was not to be used to develop a competing program (perhaps it still says that).
Software proprietors often encourage users to not act in their own interests, but instead to act in favor of the proprietor's interests. Some do this by making it look like the proprietor is doing them a favor--calling the inherent domination over the user non-free software poses "a very symbiotic relationship". This poster also chose to use some fearmongering to drive the point home--confusing commercial and proprietary, this poster tells us "Either grow-up, trust others to do the right thing, and invite commerical enterprises into Linux passed just the shops that develop the big iron or doom yourselves to an existence where Linux only runs on servers and has no commercial packages avaliable.". So, if we don't accept that proprietors want to treat the free software community like a market and not contribute to it, they might go away!
Digital Citizen
It is sad that there was this conflict, but I found this quote to be one of the most encouraging I have seen about the continues existence of free software.
The arguments about open source tend to revolve around compensation for programmers - if software is free, how can money be made writing it? This quote indicates to me that there is a healthy need for commercial software - enough to provide good compensation to the technologists and companies that write it. I know from personal experience the value of free software in enhancing commercial value (much of my employer's automated test is based around Python, with our embedded software based around avr-gcc), and this tells me that the ultimate end of a successful free software movement is not the elimination of commercial software, or economic benefits for developers.
It's not wasting time, I'm educating myself.
I accept Linus's change with no prejudging and look forward to the future with positivity.
Not least because we need attention drawn to things ilke subversion.
A blog I run for the wealth
The author of BSD/PD licensed software is inputting time/cash to cause code use, the GNU author is inputting time to cause code use and extract code improvements made by others' time/cash, the proprietary software author is inputting time to extract cash.
The BSD/PD license author has no codebase to start from other than other BSD/PD software. The GNU author can start with BSD/PD or other GNU code. The proprietary software author can start with proprietary code ( for a fee ) or BSD/PD code.
There seems to be more Gnu software out there than BSD/PD software. So on a quantity_of_software * number_of_users = software_use, GNU, not BSD/PD would seem to be more effective at making use of a technology widespread. However, it will never be used by proprietary software vendors.
And there will always be some types of specialized software that are general purpose enough to be sold to other, but which are not the kind of thing that someone would release as free software. Some software is ONLY used by large faceless corporations, and to release high quality software to them for free would mean foregoing the cash to be had by selling it to them without the satisfaction of having done a 'good deed'. Who cares if Megacorp gets it's widget counting software for free, or by paying a million dollar$ for it? Heck without Megacorp's cash, how could a programmer eat? So there will always be proprietary software that is sold. ( This leaves out the vast majority of proprietary software that is only remotely useful to the one Megacorp that paid staff programmers to write it, and which will never be sold, and which copyright is irrelevant to the disposition of )
BSD/PD code survives, I think, because of A) well endowed institutions that pay people to maintain it and B) would be proprietary software writers that would like to use some BSD/PD code that almost but does not quite yet meet their needs, who choose to release the code improvements as BSD/PD in order to get the widest market for their proprietary software which is dependent on the improvements. GNU software authors also have this incentive to improve BSD code. As long as the big-rich-well-endowed-maintainer of the BSD code is doing an ok job of keeping the codebase worth using there is no need not to release the improvements as BSD rather than as a proprietary or gnu fork. But the more improvements to BSD code that you make, the more value they have and the more you have to ask yourself if A) you should keep your improvements proprietary, or if you are a GNU author, B) if you are maintaining this BSD/PD code, wouldn't you like some help? Maybe a GNU fork would be smarter even if it's a forking PITA.
And releasi
Both AOL and MS are 'evil' faceless corps.
Netscape was earning AOL zip. It had almost no marketshare. What to do? Pay a few developers to manage the codebase and work on some improvements all ultra low budget, and release it as open source. Now Firefox is again challenging IE, and IE will have to get better or lose more marketshare.
The browser war is over for AOL, but for next to nothing, AOL planted a seed that is going to cost MS plenty. Whoever wins, ( or even if the 'war' continues indefinately ) AOL ( and everyone else ) gets a better browser for it. The competition means MS can't tie it's MSN in too completely and completely wipe out AOL. (AOL's biggest worry should be broadband internet. Who would keep AOL; but who would keep it with broadband?? By creating 'chaos' via open source AOL has helped disrupt the 'order' that Microsoft unchecked would impose. It will be forced to make it's crappy insecure browser better rather than being able to sit on it's 'laurels' ( read ass ) and reap the rewards of monopoly for nothing. And we have firefox!
Chaos creates the cracks, the niches, that we all live in. Free software is a positive way to shake things up. And it's more effective than any negative disruption you could think of, and makes you a 'nice guy' to boot.