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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."
For everyone who doesn't unterstand this. It was an April fool.
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.
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
Perforce is free for open source development.. for now.. ;-)
Linus was dropping important patches - cos his versioning was done from a mail spool.
Larry was writing Bitkeeper and had been pushing this for a couple years. Finally Linus gave in - saying there was a problem - and agreed to use a vcs that didn't get in his way. Then Larry made his pitch...
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
The question is where to go now? My preference would be GNU Arch, as it's more decentralized.
Hi Bruce,
You want to keep an eye on Monotone. Recently, it has gone through a redesign specifically aimed at making it changeset-oriented, with a view to replacing BitKeeper. It has a ways to go, but the project is active and the work is professional. Arch and Subversion are both worthy and usable systems right now, and many projects are already working happily with one or the other.
Regards,
Daniel
Have you got your LWN subscription yet?
on the linux kernel mailing list
linus didn't consider the nature of what he was using and got burned.
Well, let me point out Andrew Morton is the guy who does most of the heavy lifting on the kernel these days, and he uses his own scripts.
Have you got your LWN subscription yet?
But that is, of course, not what seems to have happened. What happened, accordingto the write up, is that someone who had at some point been been payed some moeny by OSDN was, completely unrelatedly, working on a possibly competitive product. No one is claiming this contractor was using BK in his work on that product.
basicly BM's interpretation of the licence is that no one who has any connection, however tenuous, with an organisation using the free BK can work on a version control system. This looks to me to be a clause specifically created to be impossible for the licencee to police, and so to provide a way for BM to remove the licence on a whim.
_O_
.|< The named which can be named is not the true named
Oh course, outside of April 1, they are moving their entire source tree to subversion.
This will soon prove (or disprove) the viability of subversion for very large projects. Linux kernel development model is significantly different though, so what works for KDE might not work for the kernel.
I accept that it might have been the only working solution at the time, but Linus would have done better if he'd said it was temporary until a good Open Source product came along. Because it was anyway. There are consequences. 1000 people are going to have to learn a new facility, that facility is going to have to be deployed and files are going to have to be moved into it in a laborious version by version process to convert them, etc. There is also all of the surplus heat produced by the multi-year argument that Bitkeeper brought and some loss of productivity because of that, includng some untold number of people who would otherwise have worked on the kernel but bugged out because of the Bitkeeper decision.
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
Using which storage backend? BerkeleyDB or the filesystem-based storage system?
Are you sure it was really that much slower with a huge repository? Or just with a huge working copy?
Subversion is not universally faster than CVS (checkouts and imports can be significantly slower, but you don't do those very often anyway), but it's generally faster where it counts. It also scales very nicely (for the most part), and I'd be surprised if correct use of SVN was really that much slower, even at 120K files. (I've never had a repository that big, but people talk about having them that big on the mailing list all the time.) One place where it might be slow is if you have a working copy with 120K files in it and try to do an update or commit from the top-level WC directory, since that would require SVN to locally crawl the whole WC tree. There is work being done to improve the places where SVN still lacks in speed, though.
As for being unusable around 1000 files? That's a bunch of crap. I use a >5000 file working copy every single day (>20000 file repos), and it is VERY zippy.
"If English was good enough for Jesus, it's good enough for everyone else."
nobody would be able to make a living writing software
I have managed contracts to fund developers working on open source software projects. My employer pays programmers to write software and to release it with an open source license. The Department of Energy (our funding source) has spent literally millions of dollars over the last few years on projects like this.
I contest the claim that writing open source software entails no monetary compensation to the software developer.
...and tells you that you can use it as much as you want, as long as you don't use it to transport parts for other cars. You switch your entire corporate fleet to this car, which would ordinarily be prohibitively expensively but is a lot better than the offerings at Joe's Free Car Lot. You come to depend on those loaner cars.
Some guy at an unrelated company looks at the loaner car's ignition system to see if he could make it work on one of the models available at Joe's Free Car Lot. Your "friend" responds by yanking everyone's loaner cars.
What do you do next? Try to find someone else to loan you an expensive car? Buy a new fleet of your own? Or decide that helping Joe upgrade his fleet to everyone's mutual benefit is a worthy investment?
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
This excercise hasn't been a complete loss for either Bitmover Corp. or for the Open Source community. Both have gotten something out of it, but now they're going separate ways.
Also note that BitMover is attempting to make the split as amicable as possible. He could have shut down support and distribution of the free version as of yesterday. Instead he seems to be committing to providing one last (critical) major update, and then close down development of the free version, as well as providing a few month's warning. If he was being an asshole, he would have waited until the Kernel was a week away from the 65K change limit and then dropped support with no warning.
This is something like breaking up with a girlfriend. You can do it in a respectful way, or you can do it with yelling screaming and personal items thrown out in the street. Larry seems to be doing the former. Calling him a capital bastard is pushing things in the other.
Most of my ex-girlfrinds I can still show up at the door at 9pm and be invited in for some (herbal) tea and a nice chat. I really can't quite wrap my mind around people who can't visit any of their exs' without a court order. It's just so disrespectful of the quality time and experiences that came out of the relationship (presuming that the relationship wasn't just a 'gimme' fight). Yes, does take some work to do an amicable breakup, but here's lots of value to being able to have a sane conversation with your ex. Don't knock it until you've tried it.
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
Well, that's the question, isn't it? You state this like it is obvious, but it isn't obvious. Reverse engineering for interoperability is protected under US copyright law AND the DMCA. In fact, there is at least one court case pending right now to determine this very issue. Read more about it here. Very interesting stuff.
Anyway, given that
- The OSDL had the license
- the employee was NOT employed by OSDL to do the reverse engineering and
- reverse engineering is protected under copyright law
I could see OSDL suing BitMover for breach of contract, which seems backwards, but I really think it is questionable if they gave BitMover any cause to do this, and it is going to cost them dearly to migrate over the entire version history to a new format, especially from one that is proprietary and needs to be reverse engineered before the move can happen.You mean like this? Not that I'm claiming that the BSD license is better than the GPL or vice versa. Just trying to point out the fact that Apple has been pretty good about contributing back to the community, regardless of the license.
There was never a chance that this relationship could work, because of the lack of an Open Source license and the mercurialism Larry regularly displayed.
Thanks
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
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.
I hate replying to anon's, as it's unlikely they will read the reply... but anyway..
Every programming job I've had has been code for only one company. Mostly intranet/extranet coding (lotus domino shit), but also various programs for research companies etc. I can't imagine any of those jobs going if everything became opensource.
So yeah, it requires replacement if the BK folks say it does, and the friction got significant enough that Linus wants to make it happen. Linus has tried to make it sound like he & Larry McEvoy (?) have amicably come to this agreement. That may be the case. Larry isn't getting anything out of his free version anymore, and Linus isn't Vivien Leigh. He doesn't want to depend on the kindness of strangers.
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
Subversion's Open Letter on this topic:l
http://subversion.tigris.org/subversion-linus.htm
Don't take my word for it, read the official statement from the subversion developers, "Please Stop Bugging Linus Torvalds About Subversion".
The kernel development model, as molded by BitKeeper, needs a highly decentalized model which encourages forks as a way of staging kernel changes.
We're talking about distributed change management in this case, it's not one database. The thread that matters to most people is the one Linus manages, and he pulls out a tarball every time he merges changes into that one. And I assume it will be mirrored and backed up. Now, I only know about Arch, but Arch doesn't even use a database as you would think of one. It's a tree of files, plain files, served by FTP or HTTP, and if you corrupt a revision you corrupt that one only.
I can't believe that things are going to be nearly so bad as you think. I suggest you watch the kernel list once Linus comes back.
Bruce
Bruce Perens.