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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.
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.
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.
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!!!!
"If that's what he feels most productive using, what difference does it make?"
Indeed. If he decided tomorrow that future kernels would all be compiled in Microsoft Visual C++, what would be the problem? After all, it's not as though his choices on tools affect anyone but him, is it?
Oh, except that all the other developers are forced to either use the same tools he does or find workarounds to allow them to use different tools.
Personally I've always felt that relying on a payware source control program for kernel development was a big risk, and removed much of the stimulus to create really first-class open source source control programs: I guess that's now been clearly demonstrated. And regardless of who's in the wrong here, I can't help but feel that the Bitkeeper folks are going to lose a lot of sales due to programmers regarding them poorly as a result of this action.
...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.
It is important to other people working on the kernel though.
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." ---
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.
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
yeah, nobody would care what YOU use because you're not heading a biiiiig public project that depends on the whatever tools you will choose.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
Ok, fair enough...but I'm still not sure I understand why.
How does what he uses impact their own work? They're able to work using their own choice of software, regardless of what he uses, right?
No gods, no demons, and no masters. Secular Humanism!
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?
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?
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.
removed much of the stimulus to create really first-class open source source control programs
Seems to me a lot like the opposite happened. All the people objecting to the use of non-free software by Linus has encouraged adding BitKeeper like features to open source alternatives.
Being "wrong" and being supported are two different things.
I don't think mormons are "wrong" but I also don't give them money, time, etc either.
BK is a company with some employees [or so I'm told] and they sell a tool they let the OSS community use for free. Some asshat thought it would be cool to subvert BKs goals. So BK is not supporting OSS anymore.
It would be different if BK was filing a lawsuit or something. Cuz then yeah I'd say GFY to BK.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
I can't tell if you're being purposely dense, but what the hell.
BitKeeper is a revision control system. SourceForge is a site which hosts projects which can be accessed and modified using CVS, a revision control system which is (in the opinion of most) dated and shitty.
"Orthodoxy means not thinking--not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness." --Eric Blair
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?
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)
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
A kernel developer who uses BK can deliver patches to kernel using BK. These patches can be examined in BK, and applied to the main kernel tree with BK. In other words, the whole patch and change management process can happen with BK, and this makes Linus' job a lot easier. A kernel developer who uses BK to provide his change to Linus will have his change incorporated much faster than someone who doesn't use BK.
And the men who hold high places must be the ones who start
To mold a new reality... closer to the heart
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.
"They're able to work using their own choice of software, regardless of what he uses, right?"
/. mods mod it insightful.
As this is the version control system for the kernel tree the obvious answer to your question is, no. They will have to use the version control system that is used, that is essentially, the one Linus using, that's why there is so much talk about this issue.
And you were right, you first post probably should have been modded troll, or at least uninformed, funny to see the
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...
Disclaimer: No, I have not RTFA...
There is no "theft of MitMover's work". The independant contractor in his own free time was working on creating a competing product.
By your logic, Open Office is stealing the work of MS on its Office suite...
Further, when I contract with a company, they have NO influence on what side projects I do. I would probably be offended if they even asked me to stop working on a personal project.
on the linux kernel mailing list
The OSDL is funding an unrelated project that employs some guy who also works on a project (not funded by OSDL) unrelated to the aforementioned one that seeks to reverse engineer BitKeeper.
Yes, I am utterly outraged too! Yes, Linus should go stand in the corner--at least until the new pope is chosen!!
Sure, this may be a violation of the license--but it's one hell of a slimy license.
Are OSDL employees allowed to call the ambulance if they see this guy bleeding to death on the street, or is that forbidden too (on account of aiding/facilitating further reverse engineering of BitKeeper)?
Akarsz Magyar Gentoo fórumot? Akkor
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).
You have less respect for OSDL since they basically said "What an employee does on his own time is his own business?"
Read here
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/4/6/121
user@ubuntubox:~$ stfu This server is going down for shutdown NOW!
No. If it's a cvs repository, I must use cvs to access it, if it's subversion, I must use subversion... etc.
The whole "he's a contractor, so I have no control over what he does" line is complete bullshit, IMHO. Contractors are also required to comply with various agreements that their clients have with other companies. OSDL had an agreement with BitMoover, and therefore the contractors they hire must also abide with that agreement.
And the men who hold high places must be the ones who start
To mold a new reality... closer to the heart
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." ---
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!
Jesus, I assume you've never been on a development team of more than 1 person have you? If we switched from CVS to Subversion for example, everyone submitting code changes would be required to use the Subversion client. Nobody is going to submit a patch to the code using diff tools unless you're still living in the 80's. For example, a large integrated development environment like Eclipse has built-in integration with CVS so that you can easily see how incoming code differs from your existing code and offer the ability to swap in individual code segments. If Linus chooses a different version control system, everyone who submits code to the Linux kernel would be required to use the appropriate version control client. I would assume there are quite a few developers that submit code to the kernel. I think it's a rather stupid move for BitMover to suddenly impose this on all the users.
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.
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."
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.
The contractor here was doing the reverse-engineering on his OWN time. There is no contract obligation for what you do on your own time. OSDL was not funding this person to do the reverse-engineering on OSDL's behalf. Therefore, your argument is without basis.
Hah! I'm having a slashdot break because ClearCase is punching me in the head *right this instant*!
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
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)
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
The end result is that OSDL's actions have forced BitMover into taking away the best tool the Linux community had for version control. Nothing else even comes close to BK for what Linus was doing. OSDL has hurt the open source community, not helped it. We used to have a free version of BK to use for our projects, but thanks to OSDL, we don't any more.
And the men who hold high places must be the ones who start
To mold a new reality... closer to the heart
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.
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
First of all, he was a contractor, not an employee. Secondly, this individual was undermining an agreement that his client had with another company. That's always a stupid thing to do.
And the men who hold high places must be the ones who start
To mold a new reality... closer to the heart
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.
Typically, only organizations with deep pockets are going to be shelling out big $$$ for a commercial version control system. The programmers will typically have zero influence on the purchasing decisions.
I read
Contractor or employee, doesn't matter. The company does not own you.
The better question, did he know he was undermining it?
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.
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
Sorry, you are wrong. Over 90% of programmers work on propietary software that is used internally by business or organizations. RMS knows this and does not have a single issue with it.
RMS only cares about the users' ability to improve and redistribute the software they have.
Personally, I have worked as a programmer for 18 years and have seen a constant cycle of external applications brought in, only for bugs to be found and not fixed, and companies drop products. Large commercial products like JDE or Insure90 come with source to prevent this very issue.
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.
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.
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
If BitMover had never provided a free version in the first place, no one would be complaining! Yet now we have a bunch of schmucks who are upset because it's only partially free. If you don't like the license, then just don't use the product. BitMover's license was very reasonable.
Are OSDL employees allowed to call the ambulance if they see this guy bleeding to death on the street, or is that forbidden too (on account of aiding/facilitating further reverse engineering of BitKeeper)?
Now you're just being stupid. The agreement that BitMover made with OSDL was very benign, and you're making it sound as if they wanted someone's first-born in exchange.
And the men who hold high places must be the ones who start
To mold a new reality... closer to the heart
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.
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
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
It's not my analogy. From the parent post to MY post:
And I agree - the analogy doesn't work. If anything, my version is simply a somewhat corrected version of an already flawed analogy. I'm not entirely sure yours is much better.
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
Yes, I did use hyperbole.
... in exchange for a promise not to use BK to develop a competing product."
"BitMover provided a free version of their product
Provided their free version to OSDL. Right? So why is OSDL getting punished because of some guy they have an indirect business association with?
The point is that the guy is not an employee, and is not doing the "offending work" under payment from OSDL. Paying him money for unrelated work seems no more wrong than calling him an ambulance. Is this guy a fugitive that no assistance can be rendered unto him?
Akarsz Magyar Gentoo fórumot? Akkor
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.
Look at the situation Wal-Mart was in when it was discovered that some of their cleaning crew were illegal aliens. Wal-Mart hires contracting firms to keep its stores cleaned. One of these firms knowingly hired illegal aliens. Wal-Mart executives knew that this was happening. Wal-Mart was punished because of their complicity with the crime. Similarly, OSDL is being punished for their complicity with the person violating the contract.
Unfortunately, it's not just OSDL that's being punished. The entire open source community is being punished for OSDL's actions, because now no one can use BK for free. Obviously, OSDL didn't give a damn about other open source developers who were happy to agree with BK's license.
And the men who hold high places must be the ones who start
To mold a new reality... closer to the heart
The 10% figure definitely "feels right", based on experience. It's funny, of all my collegues and the other programmers I know, I only know one that actually worked/works for a software house, he works for IBM, and he doesn't actually work on any of their packaged software products. True fact.
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.
Surely there is a measure of difference between something against the law and something in breech of a contract.
And I don't see why OSDL is at fault for BitMover throwing a hissy fit and taking the ball home.
Akarsz Magyar Gentoo fórumot? Akkor
Did you look into using revision libraries at all? Additionally, what about using hard links when you check out the project? Cached revisions (a complete tarball up to patch-N)? Perhaps you should also consider multi-config projects... Tagged branches? There are plenty of ways to get around the "tla is slow" argument.
assert(expired(knowledge));
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.
Larry's comments seem not to disagree with this reasoning. From TFA:
It will also be nice if their future features will eventually become available in the form of an equally compelling open-source RCS, but if the past five years are any indication, we can expect not to see truly innovative features on the FLOSS side for a long time. And that is really unfortunate, but hopefully the monotone people will pick up the slack.
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.
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
Is untrue and an oversimplified statement! Untrue, because Larry states the other reasons (gets too expensive) in the press statement. Oversimplified, because the cause/effect is obviously more complex and the authority of the decision lies at Bitmover in the end! He always had the power to pull the plug; now he used that power due to an event but don't tell us there were no other options available. E.g. just because one corporation infringes a license doesn't mean the software shouldn't be available anymore.
WE DON'T NEED NO BLOG CONTROL.
(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.
I'd also add that I'd expect that any organization calling itself Open Source Development Labs should be taken to task by the FOSS community at large if they tried to tell an employee what they could/could not do during their own time. Wouldn't that be antithetical to their entire mission?
BitMover can yank the free version if they want, it's their product and their right. But I don't see how OSDL should or even could regulate what their employees do outside the office.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!!
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
There's an instant "-1 Flamebait" target if ever I saw one.
Listen up. Software doesn't need support, ever. Users need support, to varying degrees. So your fundamental premise is a misleading straw man.
Free Software neither eliminates or increases the need for user support. Good software, regardless of how it's licensed, is easier for the user to use without hand-holding. Free Software increases the options available to the user, and eventually market Darwinism will tend to narrow the field to the packages which best meet the users' needs. Not the market monopolist's need, mind you: the true needs of the real users. Niche minority software packages will continue as long as someone is interested in it, even if it's just the solitary unwashed hippy developer.
In short, developers should develop what the damn hell they feel like, and the users should use whatever they feel comfortable with.
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
Kernel SCM saga...
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
And normally that's fine and dandy. But can't you imagine a circumstance where a company claims to pay an employee for one thing (shuffling papers) while really paying them to do the work (copying a competitor's software) they are claiming to do in their 'off time'?
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...
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.
MP3 is patent-encumbered, however.
OTOH, the Flash format is more or less openly documented, and there are OSS viewers.
DNA just wants to be free...
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.
BitMover removed it and BitMover has complete control over it, therefore it's BitMover's fault bitkeeper is now non-free.
That Larry blames OSDL for his decision doesn't take away from the fact that it was his decision.
You blame the driver, not the tree.
Or, in this case, you blame little Joe for taking home his fancy wooden ball just because John is carving one that looks similar to it.
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.
I liked the Amiga hardware in the 1980s, because it drastically outperformed off-the-shelf hardware for not much more money. I hated the original Amiga hardware in the 1990s because it drastically underperformed off-the-shelf hardware. By the late 1990s, my A3000 was loaded with a graphics card, a sound card, a CPU card, etc and I placed virtually no value at all on the Amiga's original hardware capabilities. I loathed when some program displayed an ECS screenmode instead of using my graphics card.
(And even then, I loved my Amiga, because the software was so damned awesome, and the OS so efficient that the machine held its own against machines with ten times the processing power.) In my eyes, my expanded-with-commodity-hardware Amiga was still an Amiga, just a better Amiga. In your eyes, I guess it wasn't.
And I gotta agree with Squiggleslash: if AmigaOS had been Free Software, I'd probably still be using it today. Switching to Linux was a major bummer and a downgrade in some ways. But I got used to it, because AmigaOS's rot and the agony that went with it, gave me resolve: never again will I experience that helplessness and heartbreak. Free Software gives me that guarantee.
Now I guess it's Linus' turn to learn that lesson, although he's still getting off relatively easy, so it might not be enough to change him, yet.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
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?
Someone posting as an anonymous coward asking someone to come out and say something and stand behind it... oh the irony.
And remember back when we employed people to clean our ovens? Who the hell decided it was a good idea to start selling self-cleaning ovens? Or dishwashers! That used to be a profession, now it's a machine.
And barcodes with electronic inventory management systems. We used to pay people to keep track of inventory. It was an honored profession, and now a few swipes of a laser every time something arrives or is sold and, no more profession.
You, my friend, have fallen victim to the 'broken window fallacy'. Doing makework is not good for the economy. Operating unneeded companies is makework.
The 10% of the software that everyone uses does not need to be sold. By defination, 'everyone' includes 'people capable of writing the software', so we can just let them do it, and there's less makework. (You can question why they want to do it for free, but, they obviously are doing it for free, so the question is rather moot.)
Anyway, while your point would be silly in any normal software enviroment, it's incredibly stupid in our MS-dominated world. Either you work at MS, or you'll be out of a job anyway.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
You're a couple years out of date. It's been storing stuff on the file system for quite some time now.
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
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
Yep, of course (though I'll presume you meant "violating a license to develop a copy of a competitor's software" where you said "copy a competitor's software").
So you sue the employee for a large amount of money with all your impressive evidence of their license violation... and then try to cut a deal where the employee testifies against his employer about the deception.
It's going to be tricky and risky and take a lot of time and expensive lawyers, yes. But that's just the way things work.
As an aside, I doubt that most companies would try to disclaim responsibility (as a legal tactic) for a piece of software their employee's developing. I mean, what are they going to do after that if they actually want to do stuff with this software? "Buy" it from their employee? Well all right, maybe, but it just seems tangled.
Quite frankly, I just think it's wrong to have a clause like "thou shalt not attempt to reverse-engineer and/or develop your own implementation of this software." I think it's an unreasonable intrusion on your rights, and I'd like to think that such a clause wouldn't hold up in court.
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
And if you think it's wrong to have a clause like that in the software, you can simply not use that software. You don't have the right to use it and then go against the license agreement just because you don't think the license should be that way. I think a judge would agree.
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.
Well yes, absolutely. :)
I may not have been entirely clear. I think it's morally wrong for Bitmover (for example) to put such a clause in their license. I'm not necessarily trying to justify someone agreeing to such a license and then violating it.
But if I was a judge on such a case, I'd probably rule something like "Yep, he violated that license totally and utterly" and then issue a fine of one dollar. :)
"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.
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
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.
"In short, developers should develop what the damn hell they feel like, and the users should use whatever they feel comfortable with"
That particular programmer who does what he wants and F%&&% the world type attitude is one poor programmer.
Aside from the fact that there were many good things about the OS alone, as others have mentioned, what about the possibility of companies producing new Amigas, running the OS on non-commodity hardware?
There were plenty of companies wanting to produce new Amigas, but they were ultimately prevented by not being able to licence the OS. Now finally there are two new Amigas - the AmigaOne (running the official AmigaOS, which for years hadn't been developed), or the Pegasos (which runs an AmigaOS clone that had to be written from scratch). Imagine if this sort of thing could be done 5 or more years earlier?
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