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."

Comments

I cant wait

[Wizy]

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.

Re:I cant wait

[Wizy]

As another reply, this quoting Linus himself:
"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 ;)"

Seems he is already looking into using it.

Take aim at foot, Fire!

[Sanity]

Wow, non-free software vendor decides to drop support for a piece of software leaving their loyal users out in the cold. Thanks BitMover for proving why Linus' decision to rely on a non-free version control system was a mistake.

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.

In it for the money

[Kevster]

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?

Larry never got it

[nagora]

Larry goes on about how pro-open source he is but anyone that licences products with a restriction on what the users can do in their own free time is an arsehole. If MS had produced an EULA for Word that said it can't be used by people who use Acrobat Distiller, they would have rightly been scorned. Same goes for Larry and his odious BitKeeper restrictions.

TWW

Huh?

[ABCC]

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?

Re:Too Obvious Answer

[kfogel]

"Unusably slow" over a thousand files or so is totally unexpected, and not my experience at all.

The Subversion tree itself has more than a thousand files, yet we don't have any speed problems. I'd like to know exactly what you're observing, and what might be causing it.

keesh, would you mind describing the your slowness problems on users@subversion.tigris.org? Thanks.