No More BitKeeper Linux

An anonymous reader writes "KernelTrap has a lengthy article detailing BitMover's recent decision to drop support for its free version of BitKeeper. Linus Torvalds began using BitKeeper back in February of 2002, a decision that has resulted in frequent flamefests, but also in increased kernel development productivity. Evidently the recent decision was due to OSDL's decision to keep paying a developer who was working on reverse engineering BitKeeper... What tool Linus will move to is still being determined."

Comments

I cant wait

[Wizy]

I cant wait for the "I told you so" articles. Lets put money on whose will be best. I have my money on Richard Stallman.

Re:I cant wait

[FreeLinux]

Looks like you win. See here.

Re:I cant wait

[Anonymous Coward]

But it's true, linus didn't consider the nature of what he was using and got burned.

While everyone has a fit when stallman is mentioned, it's true that the people who don't consider the politics of licences are often burned.

Look at how much MS or Apple have given back to BSD as opposed to how much linux has got from IBM. Who has the better dynamic community of sharing?

Seriously, there are many reasons FOR the GPL. I am sick of people who aren't political having an allergic reaction to it, while you might not value the reasons for the GPL there *ARE* perfectly legitimate and powerful reasons for believing in it.

There is tons of hateful propaganda against the GPL. I don't mind the BSD guys* doing what they do, it's cool. I have respect for them. But I don't like the hate that gets sent back. It's one thing not to agree, it's another thing to just characterise other people as "weenies" and "hippies" or whatever.

*Fully comprehending that there are pro-BSD trolls that don't represent all of BSD community. Just talking about impressions.

Re:I cant wait

[Valdrax]

If by best, you mean most condescending, long-winded, repetitive, and self-righteous, I think you win.
...Not that the man doesn't have point this time, but I wish he could make it without being so insufferable about it.

Re:I cant wait

[caluml]

I went to see him speak in Bristol once. I can see why people think he is a bit of a nut, ranting, and raving.
I think it's just that he really, really, really, really believes strongly in what he believes in. And that if you don't understand it, you are somehow stupid/lesser/not worth talking to.

Re:I cant wait

[Bruce Perens]

Well, mine isn't best but I sure want to be counted as an "I told you" on this one too. But it seems like lots of people told him so, and we all got dissed because they said we weren't pragmatic. Well, we were pragmatic, and the folks who thought they were the pragmatic ones weren't thinking through consequences all of the way to the end-game.

The question is where to go now? My preference would be GNU Arch, as it's more decentralized. But it may not be ready for this heavy a use, and I am hardly an expert in revision control.

Bruce

Re:I cant wait

[ultrabot]

Well, we were pragmatic, and the folks who thought they were the pragmatic ones weren't thinking through consequences all of the way to the end-game.

Still, it must be said that I can hardly think any more convincing example of the superiority of OSS than what just happened.

The question is where to go now? My preference would be GNU Arch, as it's more decentralized. But it may not be ready for this heavy a use, and I am hardly an expert in revision control.

Arch is probably the only one that will do. Or something that follows the arch protocol like 'bazaar'. Too bad bazaar-ng won't be ready in time... But with arch-like repositories, there is a minimal amount of lock-in.

Re:I cant wait

[Monkelectric]

Is it gloating if you *WERE* right though? The BitKeeper guy, Larry something? Has always been a capital asshole.

The open source position on this one is not outrageous: they want a client which can't be taken away from them.

Larry, responds by *TAKING THE CLIENT AWAY* thus proving exactly what people were saying in the first place -- we've indirectly put Larry in a position of power as he controls the only tool we can now use: not only are we ethically opposed to this, but he seems to be a dick to.

Re:I cant wait

[Wizy]

Beleive me, I am on the same side as you. From what I could tell the majority will be able to say "I told you so" now. That aside, arch is the only one that has a strong focus on decentralization but as you say it isnt as mature as cvs or subversion. This could be a big enough catalyst to get a few of these groups of people to work together. Wouldnt be a bad thing to see some of the good ideas and implementations in arch and subversion merged. Of course I realize this is a pretty unlikely event (sort of like gnome and kde merging efforts entirely,) but it would be a huge step forward for completely free SCM.

Re:I cant wait

[Daniel Phillips]

The question is where to go now? My preference would be GNU Arch, as it's more decentralized.

Hi Bruce,

You want to keep an eye on Monotone. Recently, it has gone through a redesign specifically aimed at making it changeset-oriented, with a view to replacing BitKeeper. It has a ways to go, but the project is active and the work is professional. Arch and Subversion are both worthy and usable systems right now, and many projects are already working happily with one or the other.

Regards,

Daniel

Re:I cant wait

[Bruce Perens]

I can hardly think any more convincing example of the superiority of OSS than what just happened.

I think it's a demonstration that Open Source is more dependable. We understood that, but it seems paradoxical to outisders that it is the exclusive rights-holder, the very company that purports to support the software, that reduces dependability.

Bruce

Re:I cant wait

[Monkelectric]

RMS is a nut, but NUTS ARE GOOD. Bill Gates is *exactly* the opposite kind of nut. If Bill had his way, you'd "subscribe" to software and keep paying for it every month (MS has mentioned this as their ultimate goal). If RMS had his way, software would be open (good), free (good), and nobody would be able to make a living writing software (bad).

Together they put pressure on each other and arrive at a reasonable medium.

Re:I cant wait

[Wizy]

I hadnt actually looked at Monotone yet. But from a cursory look at the website it seems to fill a void, or will once it is mature enough.

The problem I see here is the level of fragmentation in the open source SCM world. Monotone looks like it is designed from the ground up to be distributed. CVS and Subversion were not, but are both much more mature projects on the standalone side. Then you have arch which seems to fit somewhere in the middle. It would be nice to have some of these teams working together since something like a subversion with the distributed nature of monotone is what we really want here.

Re:I cant wait

[harlows_monkeys]

Well, mine isn't best but I sure want to be counted as an "I told you" on this one too. But it seems like lots of people told him so, and we all got dissed because they said we weren't pragmatic. Well, we were pragmatic, and the folks who thought they were the pragmatic ones weren't thinking through consequences all of the way to the end-game

What consequences? Having the kernel be way better than it would have been if Linus had listened to you people and not used BitKeeper?

Sure, BitKeeper might be going away--but the things Linus accomplished while it was here will NOT go way.

Re:I cant wait

[Anonymous Coward]

The question is where to go now?

How about visual source safe? kidding, kidding, kidding...

Re:I cant wait

[ebh]

I heard Torvalds is cashing in some of his Transmeta stock to buy a few thousand seats of ClearCase.

Re:I cant wait

[Daniel Phillips]

linus didn't consider the nature of what he was using and got burned.

Well, let me point out Andrew Morton is the guy who does most of the heavy lifting on the kernel these days, and he uses his own scripts.

Re:I cant wait

[Wizy]

As another reply, this quoting Linus himself:
"PS. Don't bother telling me about subversion. If you must, start reading up on "monotone". That seems to be the most viable alternative, but don't pester the developers so much that they don't get any work done. They are already aware of my problems ;)"

Seems he is already looking into using it.

Re:I cant wait

[HuguesT]

> If RMS had his way, [...] nobody would
> be able to make a living writing software (bad).

RMS has himself never said that, in fact he says exactly the opposite. You should read the GNU philosophy pages before spouting such nonsense, in particular this particular aspect.

The FSF says that you should charge as much as you possibly can for Free software. Redhad in particular is demonstrating this point very well.

Presumably you know that RHEL is more expensive than Windows yet is distributed under the terms of the GPL, and therefore the freeest form of Free Software according to Stallman.

Re:I cant wait

[bankman]

If RMS had his way, software would be open (good), free (good), and nobody would be able to make a living writing software (bad).

*Sigh* After almost two decades of Free (OS) Software, you still don't get it. Even considering the fact that most FOSS programmers (who are writing software after all) are still around and so far haven't starved to death, you, amongst so many others, still believe that it's impossible to make a living out of it.

Who do you think is most qualified to deliver (meaningful) support, fixes and enhancements to any kind of software? Right, the original developers. While everybody may look at the (open) source code, the original developers are most qualified to do anything with it in a timely fashion. This one alone opens up possibilities for revenue creation.

What about hardware drivers? IBM does pay their developers to work on (GPL'd) Linux drivers so that that it can sell it to their customers, no? Or do you really think that Big Blue tells its software engineers that they will have to work for free while hacking FOSS drivers?

Just because you are too daft to figure out a viable business model doesn't mean it can't be done.

Sorry if this sounds too harsh for you, but you made a fine example of not getting IT.

Re:I cant wait

[Bruce Perens]

What consequences?

I accept that it might have been the only working solution at the time, but Linus would have done better if he'd said it was temporary until a good Open Source product came along. Because it was anyway. There are consequences. 1000 people are going to have to learn a new facility, that facility is going to have to be deployed and files are going to have to be moved into it in a laborious version by version process to convert them, etc. There is also all of the surplus heat produced by the multi-year argument that Bitkeeper brought and some loss of productivity because of that, includng some untold number of people who would otherwise have worked on the kernel but bugged out because of the Bitkeeper decision.

Bruce

Re:I cant wait

[nathanh]

Arch and Subversion are both worthy and usable systems right now, and many projects are already working happily with one or the other.

Subversion is entirely inappropriate. Linus prefers the distributed revision control tools. Subversion uses a centralised repository.

Monotone, arch and svk are all options. My money's on monotone.

Re:I cant wait

[zensonic]

What consequences? Having the kernel be way better than it would have been if Linus had listened to you people and not used BitKeeper?

Sure, BitKeeper might be going away--but the things Linus accomplished while it was here will NOT go way.

This is the big difference between a religious attitude towards OSS and a laid back engineering style attitude.

Use the best tool for the job and do not let religion get in the way of that decision! Sure the kernel developers has to find another tool now, but as the parent said: it was good while it lasted.

Re:I cant wait

[pjrc]

It's all about pace of development...

What consequences? Having the kernel be way better than it would have been if Linus had listened to you people and not used BitKeeper?

The pace of kernel development did improve. Some may have been BK's superior performance, but much was attributed to the increased delegation of responsibility (eg, RTFA)

The "consequence" is that now, this improved speed can not continue much longer, until some other replacement is developed.

Sure, BitKeeper might be going away--but the things Linus accomplished while it was here will NOT go way.

But the improved speed may go away.

Worse yet, the pace of kernel development might even slow for some time, as developers all migrate to another tool. Consider that changeset data is locked in a proprietary format that needs to be reverse engineered.

Re:I cant wait

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

If RMS had his way there would still be plenty of people out there making a living writing software. Don't buy into that anti-OSS FUD

Not just writing software - writing it better and more efficiently because they don't have to constantly re-invent the wheel nor worry about violating patents they aren't even aware of.

Re:I cant wait

[SeanAhern]

nobody would be able to make a living writing software

I have managed contracts to fund developers working on open source software projects. My employer pays programmers to write software and to release it with an open source license. The Department of Energy (our funding source) has spent literally millions of dollars over the last few years on projects like this.

I contest the claim that writing open source software entails no monetary compensation to the software developer.

Re:I cant wait

[ArsonSmith]

"...charge as much as you possibly can for Free software."

And people think its strange when someone says free software developers are nuts. I understand it, but with that basic statement very few people will.

Re:I cant wait

[Hangtime]

I've got no dog in this fight, I don't develop on Linux, use Linux, just a techy and businessman who gets to watch from the sidelines and been around Slashdot for about seven years.

Perhaps I do not get the religous thing, but as the simple business person I am struck at the audacity of the free software communitity sometimes. This was an individual and company that doubled the output of main-line Linux development over a couple year span and the only thing asked was not to try to reverse the product.

Personally, I do not think that was too much to ask. At this point, the way I read yours and other responses is that the Linux faithful have NO trust in the mores and motivations of anyone. After reading the argument its sounds like there was a very symbiotic relationship to quote the book "Getting to Yes", a win-win for each side. I think you and others in this group should take a very good look in the mirror because it was decisions made by individuals that share your viewpoint that ended this relationship because you cannot and do not trust anyone to do the right thing.

My question is where is the outrage at the OSDL for going back on its word. All I hear is bad-mouthing saying "I told you so." The reason everyone is saying I told you so is because the community broke the rules of the game is now going to pay for it. 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.

These sorts of actions by the community always trouble me because I will be creating software as a commercial enterprise one day but when certain factions within the community can't respect the agreement well that makes you less likely to write for Linux. Unlike most arguments the community does not hold the moral high-ground on this one.

Re:I cant wait

[rpdillon]

This distopia you speak of where people are subscribing to software is in fact a utopia.

A subscription model to software is in fact how it *should* be. Introversion, the three-man coding team in the UK that codes out of their bedrooms, just released a new game called Darwinia. In their interviews, they talked a bit about their last release, Uplink, and mentioned how odd it was to work 10s of thousands of hours with no pay, and then suddenly stop work, and get tons of money. They pointed out that this was VERY different from just about every other job model, including entertainers like rock bands, who make most of their money touring (making money as they work). Obviously, anyone who is salaried or gets hourly wage also makes the money as they work. Not so with independent developers.

In fact, I would go even further and say the GPL lends itself to a subscription model. While I don't love Transgaming, they understand how it should work. People keep thinking that software is a "product", one that we box up and sell on shelves in a store. It isn't. Software, more than ever, is an ongoing relationship between the users and the developers. The GPL captures this, and so does a subscription model. I don't like MS anymore than the next Slashdotter, but if they are really looking at subscription, that is a good way to go. The developers get paid as they work, which means they always have an incentive to fix bugs, add features, streamline code, etc., because they continue to get paid to do so. It also allows them to release at least some of their code under GPL, because you're not just paying for the code, you're paying for the ongoing work on the code. Anytime you want to stick with where you are (keep the current version), you can. But if you want to get the most up-to-date fixes, pay for the time they spent to do that work, or, do it yourself with the old codebase.

I honestly believe that this is the way software should work. Software should never be sold, but people can still make a living writing it. Basically, developers should sell their time and talent, not the software.

Now, MS might be doing a model more along the lines of "You can only use Office 2017 as long as you pay...if you don't pay, no more Word for you!". This is also a subscription model, and it clearly isn't a good option. But not *all* subcription models are bad, and in fact, as I've said, some are good.

Re:I cant wait

[Stephen Samuel]

I think that it's improper to call Larry a capital asshole. It seems to me that he really did try to straddle the line between proprietary and open source, and he did it in a way that failed. Hopefully this failure will be a learning opportunity for both the Open Source Community and Larry.

This excercise hasn't been a complete loss for either Bitmover Corp. or for the Open Source community. Both have gotten something out of it, but now they're going separate ways.

Also note that BitMover is attempting to make the split as amicable as possible. He could have shut down support and distribution of the free version as of yesterday. Instead he seems to be committing to providing one last (critical) major update, and then close down development of the free version, as well as providing a few month's warning. If he was being an asshole, he would have waited until the Kernel was a week away from the 65K change limit and then dropped support with no warning.

This is something like breaking up with a girlfriend. You can do it in a respectful way, or you can do it with yelling screaming and personal items thrown out in the street. Larry seems to be doing the former. Calling him a capital bastard is pushing things in the other.

Most of my ex-girlfrinds I can still show up at the door at 9pm and be invited in for some (herbal) tea and a nice chat. I really can't quite wrap my mind around people who can't visit any of their exs' without a court order. It's just so disrespectful of the quality time and experiences that came out of the relationship (presuming that the relationship wasn't just a 'gimme' fight). Yes, does take some work to do an amicable breakup, but here's lots of value to being able to have a sane conversation with your ex. Don't knock it until you've tried it.

Re:I cant wait

[Waffle Iron]

Let's say I download the evaluation version and install it and as soon as it tells me that the 30 trial is over I say: Gimme the source, so I can fix this?

Here you go.

Re:I cant wait

[Deusy]

You might also consider Darcs, whose website also keeps a copy of the Linux source in a repo.

It's decentralized and all that jazz. A darcs repo is hosted over http (or ssh) so it doesn't impose much in terms of hosting requirements.

The only downside is perhaps that it's written in Haskell and that some distros don't have great support for the Haskell packages Darcs needs.

Re:I cant wait

[AstroDrabb]

There is no "evaluation" version with a 30 timer that starts to nag you. You can download RHEL and make and distribute your own version such as Whitebox Linux. The only real restriction is that you cannot call it Red Hat Linux since that is a trademark of Red Hat. The main thing you get with RHEL is the enterprise grade support. If you called Red Hat and asked for support for Whitebox Linux, you would be told to go jump in a lake or something. Here is the source to RHEL 3. Go have a ball!

Re:I cant wait

[GileadGreene]

Look at how much MS or Apple have given back to BSD...

You mean like this? Not that I'm claiming that the BSD license is better than the GPL or vice versa. Just trying to point out the fact that Apple has been pretty good about contributing back to the community, regardless of the license.

Re:I cant wait

[AstroDrabb]

The majority of paid programmer get paid by a company that does not sell software. There will always be jobs for programmers like me. I work for a fortune 500 that has nothing to do with the Tech industry and has never sold one line of code. I get paid to develop in-house applications that are for use only by the company. Even if all commercial software went away and it all became GPL'ed/LGPL'ed, there will be plenty of jobs for programmers to work for companies making custom software to help companies to perform their day-to-day business.

Re:I cant wait

[scotch]

Most of my ex-girlfrinds I can still show up at the door at 9pm and be invited in for some (herbal) tea and a nice chat.

Have you considered that you might be gay?

Re:I cant wait

[2short]

"After almost two decades of Free (OS) Software, you still don't get it."

After almost two decades of Free Software, a few people make a living writing free software for people who sell something else, generally support or hardware. Despite constant assurances from RMS, no significant number of people make money from writing the software.

"Who do you think is most qualified to deliver (meaningful) support,"

A well-organized support organization. Employing the original developers might be a small advantage, but less so if the code is well written and documented.

"... fixes and enhancements to any kind of software? "
The need for fixes, and the advantage of the original developers in making fixes and enhancements are inversely proportional to the quality of the code. Certainly they'll have some advantage, since no code is perfect, but it's hard to ask people to strive to eliminate their market advantage. That said, I actually have paid people for enhancements to their BSDish licensed code. Where'd I get the money? Selling proprietary software.

Certainly there are ways to fund some software development that aren't dependent on the code being closed. But for a lot of software, there is a much more effective and direct way to fund it if it is not open source: You can just charge for the actual product.

"Just because you are too daft to figure out a viable business model doesn't mean it can't be done."

I've got a viable business model. I spend a lot of money writing software that a bunch of people will pay a significantly smaller amount of money for. Then I sell it to them. I make money, they get the software without any one of them paying for all the development. I fail to see the problem.

Re:I cant wait

[metamatic]

If BitMover stated up front that all licenses would be withdrawn from all Linux developers in the event that any single Linux developer tried to reverse engineer BitKeeper, then Linus was a total idiot for agreeing to that license.

If BitMover did not state those conditions up front, then they are being evil and manipulative in yanking licenses from unrelated parties in a fit of pique over what one person is doing in his own time.

Is that balanced enough for you?

Personally, I'm struck by the audacity of a software company trying to control what someone uses a piece of software for, after giving it to him. If Microsoft said you were prohibited from using Windows to write articles critical of Microsoft and contrary to their interests, you would presumably have no problem with that?

Re:I cant wait

[shutdown -p now]

most FOSS programmers (who are writing software after all) are still around and so far haven't starved to death

We are still working on that.
- Billy G.

Re:I cant wait

[Heretik]

So you think the entire 'software economy' (barf) is based upon reimplementing crap that has already been done?

Man, if all you do is rewrite things that already exist, you deserve to lose your job.

The rest of us will be glad we're not wasting our time, and have a large pool of code to draw from to, you know, solve problems

Re:I cant wait

[natet]

My question is where is the outrage at the OSDL for going back on its word. All I hear is bad-mouthing saying "I told you so." The reason everyone is saying I told you so is because the community broke the rules of the game is now going to pay for it.

OSDL didn't go back on its word. It kept its word to the developer that worked for them. They chose not to censure a developer, who in his spare time was working on reverse engineering bitkeeper features for another SCM. Though Linus works for OSDL, OSDL is not the company responsible for the Linux kernel. They don't use Bitkeeper themselves for other projects, so, OSDL was not beholden to BitMover with regards to the clause about developing a competing product. Based on what I read in the press release, and in the article, I surmise that Larry was considering dropping the free version for some time, as the benefits of the symbiotic relationship between BitMover and the kernel developers were tapering off, and this gave him the excuse he was looking for.

I'm sorry you feel that way about commercial ventures on Linux. I must say, that expecting that no one will try to duplicate the feature set of a successful program is unrealistic, in any market. Closed or Open source, it makes no difference. If your competitor has a feature that makes it successful, you better have that feature in your own product, or you start falling behind. If you think that closed source competitors won't do this to you, then you are just naive.

Re:I cant wait

[shutdown -p now]

This was an individual and company that doubled the output of main-line Linux development over a couple year span and the only thing asked was not to try to reverse the product.

It wasn't about reverse-engineering the product, it was about a protocol. And yes, it is too much to ask - close your code as much as you like, but give us the specs, or at least let us reverse-engineer. Protocols must be open.

Re:I cant wait

[jonbryce]

Lot's of people already have fixed this.

The software is free, but the trademark isn't, so you can't call the modified collection of programs Red Hat.

Re:I cant wait

[Bruce Perens]

First, don't assume it was OSDL screwing over anyone. Larry changed the deal, repeatedly. It started out that we just had to use his "notification server", and then other odd terms came up at intervals like termination of the license for those who attempt to make other software compatible with Bitkeeper through reverse-engineering. OSDL refused to terminate an employee or consultant who was also reverse-engineering Bitmover as a hobby Open Source project outside of OSDL. Had they terminated that person, the hue and cry would have been greater.

There was never a chance that this relationship could work, because of the lack of an Open Source license and the mercurialism Larry regularly displayed.

Thanks

Bruce

Re:I cant wait

[ZephyrXero]

Where's the parent's +5 Insightful? The current software industry is headed for failure regardless of open source competition. They're stagnating, and if companies would learn to work together (at least partially) w/ open source projects they might have the ability to innovate and could stand to make much more money in the long term...

Re:I cant wait

[Narchie Troll]

And darcs, as much as I love it, is extremely slow to handle large projects. Extremely slow. Sometimes on the order of hours. This will likely improve, but for the time being, darcs only hosts Linux as a stress test.

And Haskell support isn't a big deal -- it can always be compiled statically.

Re:I cant wait

[bheading]

But it's true, linus didn't consider the nature of what he was using and got burned.

Burned ? This statement is utterly ignorant of the dynamics within the kernel development process whenever BK was adopted. Linus, outstanding engineer that he is, was overloaded and was at the brink of hitting the bricks - the volume of work coming into the kernel was too much. The adoption of BK not only rescued the kernel development process from the brink of the abyss but increased by an order of magnitude the degree of change getting integrated.

Linus and Greg KH have both put out statements to the effect that they have greatly valued BK's use in the kernel and that they will learn lessons from it. If they got burned don't you think they'd have said so ?

Re:I cant wait

[JohnFluxx]

Do you forget so soon that 95% of computer jobs are in house jobs, and aren't being sold outside the company? That means if GPL destroyed 'for pay' software, a minimum of 95% of the job would still be there.

Re:I cant wait

[bheading]

Bruce, I greatly respect your opinions and your contribution on most subjects but I don't agree on this one.

There are serious consequences to making the wrong choice when it comes to revision control. You've got a choice between the tried and tested such as CVS, which took years to get right, and which work but are frankly crap and get in the way - let's face it. On the other hand you can try out the new and experimental systems which dramatically improve productivity but are not tried and tested. BK bridged that gulf and provided the best of both worlds, but certain loud whiners denounced it as being against their religion and worked to undermine it ever since.

You talk about those 1000 developers - what do they do when the revision control system hits a bug or the database gets corrupted, and no-one is available to fix it ? I'd love to believe that there would be an army of dedicated people waiting in the wings, ready to step in and immediately fix the bug or the corruption in the same way that Bitkeeper did. Who is going to pay for people to do that ? Are the monotone developers going to walk out of their day-jobs and support the kernel SCM for nothing ?

Of course what might happen is one of the big corporations such as RH or IBM will generously fund an engineer to work on one of these SCM systems (notwithstanding IBM's Clearcase commitment) in which case you're back right where you were - dependency on the whims of a corporation.

I think the kernel community will live to regret making life unnecessarily hard for the BK people and will come to miss the scalability that it provided. True, in 18 months or so monotone or whatever Linus chooses may well get to the point where it is usable - no doubt after a few nasty crashes and dropped patches.

Re:I cant wait

[SeanAhern]

Dude, convincing government employees that they're parasites feeding off of the taxpaying public is next to impossible.

I fully understand and appreciate that my salary is paid for from the public largess. I would argue that my co-workers understand the same. I do everything I can to responsibly spend those dollars to do the task that Congress has tasked my Lab to do. Your comment about "parasites" argues more toward your belief about the value of that task. That's not up to me or even my Lab to decide. Take it up with your representatives and senators who fund us with the budget they vote for.

But all of that is somewhat irrelevant to the point.

I am giving counter argument to the idea that open source developers are not paid. The funding source is not germane to the argument. I gave four examples where we directly paid people to produce open source software. I'm sure you will be able to find other examples.

Re:I cant wait

[dmaxwell]

I can imagine a buggy whip cart maker making much the same laments as Henry Ford's assembly lines cranked into high gear.

Re:I cant wait

[Bruce Perens]

what do they do when the revision control system hits a bug or the database gets corrupted, and no-one is available to fix it?

They fix it. That's our way.

Are the monotone developers going to walk out of their day-jobs and support the kernel SCM for nothing ?

They will support it as well as they can without leaving their day jobs. That's pretty much how the kernel got far enough along that the kernel developers were finally able to get paid to work on it.

Of course what might happen is one of the big corporations such as RH or IBM will generously fund an engineer to work on one of these SCM systems

This was already going on, anyway - there are several folks funding various sorts of Open Source version control. But the point is that whether or not the help is coming from a corporation, the software will be under an Open Source license and thus we can walk away from the corporation if we wish, and keep the software going on our own.

Before you have sympathy for the BK "people", go back and look at how Larry has comported himself. He created this latest incident, and could have kept the world's most publicized programmer endorsing his product just by keeping his mouth closed.

Bruce

Re:I cant wait

[merdark]

Except that Ford payed his workers for their time, and consumers still needed to pay for the cars. Wait, so that means that current software companies are much like Ford's assembly lines.

Your analogy is a terribly poor.

Re:I cant wait

[HiThere]

It appearantly was VERY good while it lasted. It was also predictable (and predicted) that it would last...the questions were about how long it would last. (Well, the non-religious questions. Which *were* most of them. Some people have just been burned more badly by proprietary software than others, and are thus more averse to using it. That's not being religious, that's avoiding the hot stove.)

OTOH, it may have been a worthwhile experiment. The software now being considered, monotone, didn't even EXIST when the migration to BitKeeper started. Even now FreshMeat rates it as Alpha. (OUCH! That makes me nervous.)

But I am glad that the cord is being cut, even if I may be dubious about the timing. It's necessary that the tools, even more than the software, of the FOSS community be under a Free Software license.

Re:I cant wait

[Bruce Perens]

It's not clear to me that OSDL ever agreed to a bitkeeper license. Linus brought Bitkeeper there with him. And even Linus accepted Bitkeeper before the anti-reverse-engineering provision was in the license. But I agree that it's a demonstration that breaking licenses loses you all rights to the software. From the minute that Larry inserted the anti-reverse-engineering provision, this was destined to happen. Some of us knew better than to put ourselves in the position of having it happen to us. I never entered into a Bitkeeper license, I never used the product.

Bruce

Re:I cant wait

[Bruce Perens]

That's sort of a back-handed endorsement that would not help to sell Larry's product.

Re:I cant wait

[Bruce Perens]

Will kernel developers be happy to wait around while the bugs gets sorted out?

About as happy as they have been with GCC bugs. They have seen more than their share of those, and they will deal with them in the same way.

Time will tell if that is good enough.

Couldn't I apply all of your arguments to Open Source in general? Shouldn't they be using Microsoft C and Visual SourceSafe for the wonderful support they'd get?

I can't imagine how much money Tigris have put into Subversion at this stage, and look at the criticism the product continues to incur and the major back-end overhauls that have been taking place.

Whatever they were thinking of, it didn't work. That's business - sometimes you lose. It seems that others have better ideas than Subversion.

with it's gargantuan achievements over recent years - still relies on private support and private funding in one way or another.

That's OK. Read my Economics paper. It will explain how and why, when it works, and when it does not.

Thanks

Bruce

Re:I cant wait

[Stephen Ma]

BitKeeper provided a free, powerful system that helped Linux, and the Linux community, tremondously. No one debates that

BitMover received an immense marketing boost from Linus' adoption of BitKeeper. The company founded by Larry McVoy would probably not be viable today without Linus' implied endorsement of their product. So please don't pretend that BitMover was doing Linus a favor -- the reality was very much the other way around.

When BitMover was just getting started, nobody knew what BitKeeper was, and nobody had any idea whether it was a reliable program. Because an archive of source code is the repository of the corporate jewels, reliability is crucial. Cautious sysadmins want a revision control system to have a long track record for dependability, and they would not have touched a newbie program like BitKeeper with a ten foot pole. So BitMover's survival in a crowded market was very uncertain from the start.

Linus' adoption of BitKeeper lent it enormous credibility, and is probably the most important reason why Larry McVoy's company continues to exist today. Linus benefited somewhat from BitKeeper, but BitKeeper benefited vastly more from Linus.

Re:I cant wait

[LurkerXXX]

So let's see. What if Microsoft had an employee who was say breaking the GPL license by releasing a product that he had based on GPL code (CherryOS-like).

And MS said that's ok, because really, the employee is doing... "other" work for us, and only doing the Cherry-OS-thing on his "own-time".

Do you really expect the GPL folks who's code it was based on to buy that, and think MS might not have had some bit in it? And don't you think they'd quickly deny MS all rights to use the GPL code for any reason based on their employees breaking their license?

Re:I cant wait

[mumbleco]

Go read the previous interviews to Linus and Larry McVoy. Larry had worked on TeamWare at Sun. He was already known for his ability to write source control management systems. He explained to Linus what he could give him. He would have succeeded selling BitKeeper anyway.

It's true that BitMover got marketing from Linux, but to say they got more than what they gave is plainly wrong.

Re:I cant wait

[JohnFluxx]

I hate replying to anon's, as it's unlikely they will read the reply... but anyway..

Every programming job I've had has been code for only one company. Mostly intranet/extranet coding (lotus domino shit), but also various programs for research companies etc. I can't imagine any of those jobs going if everything became opensource.

Re:I cant wait

[eXtro]

What does "untold number" mean? That's the weasely argument that the MPAA and RIAA use to determine that they're losing billions of dollars to piracy.

In this case there's the set of people that stated that they wouldn't contribute to the linux kernel because of the Bitkeeper decision. There's also the set of people capable of contributing to the linux kernel. The intersection of these two groups is the impact on kernel development and it's offset by increased productivity due to Bitkeeper. I don't know if it's a net positive or a net negative, but neither do you.

Re:I cant wait

[kelleher]

I accept that it might have been the only working solution at the time, but Linus would have done better if he'd said it was temporary until a good Open Source product came along.

Linus did say that. What part of "I will use the best tool for the job" was unclear? The best tool was proprietary with a very friendly non-commercial license. Go through the Kernel Cousins archives - on multiple occasions Linus said he would switch to an Open Source product as soon as one existed that met his needs.

All the people saying "I told you so" now are the same people that didn't bother to get off their high horses and pay attention to Linus' position. These are the people who ignored Linus' challenge to put up or shut up, i.e. quick whining and write an open source version control system that would meet his needs. An Open Source advocate that merely complained instead of writing code is a hypocrite in my book.

Re:I cant wait

[mumbleco]

Oh, and that makes it OK? So if I hate the GPL because it doesn't let me do what I want with the software, and I refuse to use GPL products, then it's OK to flame Richard Stallman, boycot the Free Software Foundation, and criticize anyone who uses GPL software?

Wouldn't my time be better spent creating a proprietary solution?

Re:I cant wait

[arivanov]

It was a mistake to agree to work with a company run by Larry McVoy in first place. Some of us remember previous McVoyisms from time past. Namely lmbench.

For a long time it was the best stress testing tool for Linux (and Unix for that matter). In fact if you look back around 1995 it was the de-facto standard for both performance and stress testing. That continued until Larry got pissed off at someone (forgot exactly what, look in lkm for the mid-nineties). So the tool went unmaintained and into oblivion.

There is no point to try working with people like this on any large project. They take stuff which is "just business" personally. They also get pissed off personally when someone finds a weakness in their way to do business and exploits it legally. So on so fourth.

My first reaction when BM surfaced 3 years ago was "Oh no... Not another lmbench". And I see that I was right...

Re:I cant wait

[Bruce Perens]

Divert the resources in the demonstratably finite pool of OS developers to create a tool which met the need. Divert resources to adapt to the tool as it evolves. Lose effort and suffer inefficiencies as long as the evolving tool fails to support critical requirements.

I've been to this argument before. I remember when it was about why I should accept TrollTech's non-Open-Source license on Qt. People who did not want to accept that started GNOME. And as GNOME came along and threatened to eclipse their work, TrollTech was convinced to Open Source the Qt library. Their company literally took off with that decision. It's much, much larger now. But there never had to be a GNOME if TrollTech had only figured things out earlier.

Bruce

Re:I cant wait

[Dopefish_1]

Seriously, how many shitty audioplayers, xml editors, text editors, and the like are there in open source?

While this is certainly true, there's no shortage of shitty closed-source (commercial or shareware) audio /video players and text/HTML editors, either. There's squillions of them. So I think the issue is just that programmers in general like to keep scratching the same itches over, and over again--it has nothing to do with open source vs closed source.

Re:I cant wait

[arodland]

If you deny MS the right to use your code, then it's not GPL. Of course, it's hard to see a situation where it would really be necessary to do such a thing; when you're Microsoft, the GPL is about the biggest disincentive there is.

Re:I cant wait

[Pseudonym]

Their company literally took off with that decision.

"Literally"? Wow! I'd love to work for an airborne company! Anyone got an address for them? No, probably not...

Sorry. I'm not usually given to pedantry, but the mental image was too amusing.

Re:I cant wait

[bheading]

About as happy as they have been with GCC bugs. They have seen more than their share of those, and they will deal with them in the same way.

I don't think it's the same issue, Bruce. If GCC is broken you use the previous version. Easy.

If your revision control database gets corrupted due to a bug, you need to wait for someone to fix it. Integration work is suspended while it gets sorted out. Testers can't grab the latest kernel because the database is offline, their work stops too. Unless there is someone employed as a full time SCM administrator how will development proceed unimpeded ?

Couldn't I apply all of your arguments to Open Source in general? Shouldn't they be using Microsoft C and Visual SourceSafe for the wonderful support they'd get?

For these things to work properly you need support. I use "support" in it's loosest term, ie "someone nearby who knows about the program and is able to help". You need people who know how it works to fix it for you when it breaks. VSS isn't very good, in fact M$ don't even use it for their own work internally, bit of a sham really. I wouldn't tell anyone to use a product the vendor itself didn't even trust. Even CVS is better than VSS.

Regarding MS C, the thing is that GCC, unlike the various OSS SCM systems, meets the "good enough" definition. That brings me to the next big question which I have, which is - would GCC or the rest of the GNU toolset ever have reached the point they have if proprietary operating systems such as Solaris or HP-UX did not exist for Stallman and his successors to develop on ? It seemed more than acceptable to the GNU people to work along with proprietary systems when no usable alternative was available (it's a pity that does not apply in the case we are discussing). How fortunate we are that Bell/AT&T were not a little more careful when it came to looking after their source code.

Linux has developed quickly (compared with ideologically pure examples such as the Hurd) because it bends the rules a little bit and borrowed the rich pickings from the commercial world. Strictly speaking binary modules are a breach of the GPL, but Linus and the developers bent the rules. If they didn't, a significant number of machines today would not run Linux or would not support advanced graphics or wireless devices under Linux. An even stricter application of the GPL might suggest that BIOSs and bootloaders used to bootstrap machines, not only your x86s but your SPARC boxen and IBM big-iron, come under it's licensing remit.

What you have to accept is that successful open source projects are where they are today because a proprietary platform existed to bootstrap them into feasibility. Commercial organizations are playing along because they expect to get out what they put in. It doesn't matter who it is - IBM, Red Hat, Intel with their drivers, Bitmover or anyone else. In each of those cases you can bet your bottom dollar that if any of those companies start to believe that open source involvement is undermining their intellectual property base, they'll pull out and start invoking their patents.

Whatever they were thinking of, it didn't work. That's business - sometimes you lose. It seems that others have better ideas than Subversion.

That's the other problem, there's about a zillion of them, and all of them are so-so. Especially when it comes to SCM, for some unfathomable reason, people seem to prefer to go and reinvent the wheel to build their own system, rather than step in to help improve someone else's. After the BK flamewars on LKML go away, the next series of fun and exciting instalments to look forward to will be long drawn out criticism over the system that Linus eventually chooses as a replacement.

Re:I cant wait

[boots@work]

In a few projects I'm involved, compared to other distributed Apple are far less likely to send back useful bug reports or patches.

This is surprising because you'd think they actually generate *more* patches, being on a non-Linux platform and all. And indeed if you look at their source you find they actually did make lots of changes, they just didn't feed them back, which as we know is not really optimal.

Just my experience, ymmv, etc.

Not that this makes Apple evil, they just aren't as experienced in how to make open source work as folks at other companies. But they are learning, and trying to learn.

Re:I cant wait

[dvdeug]

This was an individual and company that doubled the output of main-line Linux development over a couple year span and the only thing asked was not to try to reverse the product.

Personally, I do not think that was too much to ask.

If you want the business community to not copy your product, then you better have legal safeguards, and even that often won't stop them. How can you honestly expect that the entire free software community would avoid trying to reproduce a sucessful product?

It's way, way too much to ask.

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 proprietary software producers are free to copy whatever they want--and you know they will--but you expect the free software community to roll over and play dead?

Re:I cant wait

[Bruce Perens]

If your revision control database gets corrupted due to a bug, you need to wait for someone to fix it.

We're talking about distributed change management in this case, it's not one database. The thread that matters to most people is the one Linus manages, and he pulls out a tarball every time he merges changes into that one. And I assume it will be mirrored and backed up. Now, I only know about Arch, but Arch doesn't even use a database as you would think of one. It's a tree of files, plain files, served by FTP or HTTP, and if you corrupt a revision you corrupt that one only.

I can't believe that things are going to be nearly so bad as you think. I suggest you watch the kernel list once Linus comes back.

Bruce

Take aim at foot, Fire!

[Sanity]

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

Having quickly read the RTFA, it looks like the motivation behind BitMover's hissy-fit was that a contractor of OSDL was working on reverse engineering BitKeeper's protocol in his spare time, and OSDL must have refused to, or failed to make him to stop (ouch, threatening someone's job to make them stop doing open source in their spare time, not cool!). BitMover's CEO claims to be on the side of open source, yet last time I checked interoperability was a good thing, and reverse engineering was a legitimate way to achieve it. Not according to CEO Larry McVoy, to him reverse engineering is evil, and those that do it are "bad apples" that should be punished by the rest of the open source movement.

Of course, lots of this is my own suppositions based on reading between the lines of the article, I am sure if I have got anything wrong people will be quick to correct me.

Re:Take aim at foot, Fire!

[pianoman113]

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

How has this left Linux out in the cold? Because he now has to pay to use BitKeeper? What's wrong with that? BitMover feels that OSDL broke faith with them by having a developer who was reverse engineering their product.

If BK is such hot stuff, then it will be worth some money to Linus. If it isn't, I guess he'll find something else to use.

Re:Take aim at foot, Fire!

[0x461FAB0BD7D2]

Although it may be offtopic, but non-free software vendors aren't the only ones dropping support for popular products and disappointing their loyal users. Mozilla recently did that with Seamonkey, so that they could focus on Firefox.

User loyalty means nothing anymore. It's all about the bottom-line.

Re:Take aim at foot, Fire!

[Sanity]

"Having quickly read the READ THE FUCKING ARTICLE". Well, good job reading an acronym.

Wow, only a real pain in the PITA would feel the need to point out such a pissy little error.

I wish his software was free (as in freedom,) but it isnt.

You forgot the ' in "isn't" you moron. Wow - now I feel special too! :-)

Re:Take aim at foot, Fire!

[Sanity]

How has this left Linux out in the cold? Because he now has to pay to use BitKeeper? What's wrong with that?

Because people were encouraged to rely on BitKeeper on the basis that it was free as in beer, but now it isn't, and migrating to an alternative will undoubtedly be a major burden for the Linux development process.

Re:Take aim at foot, Fire!

[Sanity]

BitMover feels that OSDL broke faith with them by having a developer who was reverse engineering their product.

According to the article the developer wasn't doing this as part of his work for OSDL.

Re:Take aim at foot, Fire!

[computerme]

so they can pay for it.

I went to the store today. i had to pay for bread and milk.

the manager did not understand my "free and in freedom is on the march" arguments he told me to just pay the damn 4 bucks.

Re:Take aim at foot, Fire!

[mattdm]

Although it may be offtopic, but non-free software vendors aren't the only ones dropping support for popular products and disappointing their loyal users. Mozilla recently did that with Seamonkey, so that they could focus on Firefox.

Actually, it's very relevant, because it's exactly the point: since Mozilla is open source, if enough people are interested, it's easy for the browser suite version to live on even if the original maintainers are no longer pursuing it. And, it turns out that enough people are, so we get a solid maintainer transition plan and a workable future for Mozilla SeaMonkey. No such thing is possible with BitKeeper.

Re:Take aim at foot, Fire!

[pianoman113]

A number of licenses have been set aside by BitMover (according to TFA) for some kernel developers. No licenses were set aside for Linus or Andrew because of their association with OSDL.
They can either purchase licenses on their own, or find new employment.

Re:Take aim at foot, Fire!

[Sanity]

Yup, like I said - a childish hissy fit, they are taking their ball and going home because OSDL wouldn't put pressure on some contractor to limit his spare time closed source activities.

Hopefully this will encourage development of a free (as in speech) alternative to BitKeeper.

Re:Take aim at foot, Fire!

[_Sprocket_]

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?

Re:Take aim at foot, Fire!

[drooling-dog]

Another good cannonball in the open-vs-closed source debate. Not only can proprietary software turn around and screw you, it can actually single you out for screwing!

Re:Take aim at foot, Fire!

[Teckla]

Wow, non-free software vendor decides to drop support for a piece of software leaving their loyal users out in the cold.

Users that don't pay for the product, and thus, don't help support the development of that product. In my opinion, that means BitKeeper doesn't owe those users anything. I wouldn't owe you a free lunch tomorrow, just because I supplied you with a free lunch today.

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

It sounds to me like BitKeeper was not only perfectly within their rights to stop supplying the free version, but even had justifiable motivation.

Re:Take aim at foot, Fire!

[Omnifarious]

I don't care what a license agreement says, unless you get to look at the source, reverse engineering should be perfectly legal. The progress of science (which is basically just reverse engineering on a grand scale) should not be stopped because it might hurt someone commercially.

Besides, it's not OSDLs job to enforce Larry McVoy's license agreement for him. Larry could sue the developer if he wanted the developer to stop. If I wrote DeCSS in my spare time, should the movie industry go after me, or my employer? What would you say if the movie industry called the fact that my employer wouldn't fire me a "Breach of faith" on the part of my employer?

Re:Take aim at foot, Fire!

[Wildfire Darkstar]

Are you suggesting BitMover should simply roll over and let anyone violate their license?

Are you suggesting that OSDL should be responsible for what its employees do while not on the clock?

Re:Take aim at foot, Fire!

[0x461FAB0BD7D2]

I know there is a group of developers who will continue to maintain Seamonkey. I happen to be one of them.

However, my point was that ignoring loyal users is not the sole domain of non-free software vendors, as the OP seemed to imply. Even though open-source developers can continue to develop a product after it is no longer supported, it still doesn't make it right.

Rather than marketshare, software vendors, both open- and closed-source, should be focusing on their loyal customers/users. However, they are managed by business school graduates, to whom, profit is everything.

Re:Take aim at foot, Fire!

[Muerte2]

I've got to imagine that ANY lost revenue due to some guy creating a BK clone has to be offset by the number of additional customers BK must have got because they could claim the linux kernel was one of their clients.

I can't think of a bigger, more successful, more openly public project than the Linux kernel (maybe Mozilla). That makes a HELL of a bullet point on your marketing brochure. If I'm mom and pop software developer and I'm comparing versioning systems and I see "BK powers the linux kernel" I'm going to know this isn't some silly little program, it's legit.

I really have to imagine that the linux kernel did more for BK than BK did for the linux kernel.

Re:Take aim at foot, Fire!

[iabervon]

I don't think this at all indicates that Linus was wrong about using BitKeeper. BitMover is going to continue to host bkbits, there's an open source version with limited functionality (which, presumably, will be extended to more complete functionality by the community), and the existing licenses are still valid. They're just not going to do further development on the free version, and so it's time to look at alternatives, not actually switch.

Linus has just posted to the mailing list saying that he is about to stop using BitKeeper, but only so that he can evaluate other things by actually throwing his real work at them. Most likely, in a week he'll say that there's one he likes best, but it's not ready, and he's going back to using BitKeeper until it is.

Personally, I think that the free and the licensing issues surrounding it have hurt BitMover more than helped it; there have been people who have reported that BitMover refused to sell them the commercial version when they were ineligable for the free license, and I suspect that this has contributed to the idea that BitKeeper might be the best SCM out there, but BitMover is too nuts to do critical business with.

Re:Take aim at foot, Fire!

[chris_mahan]

>BitMover wrote their free-use license in such a way that the gratis use of their software would benefit the user and not harm BitMover.

Benefit the users? By restricting their freedom to create a tool like BitKeeper?

>What exactly is wrong with that? Its their software, and they don't have to let anyone use it without paying.

Granted. But they can't lie either. They can lie to politicians and the average american, but they can't lie to geeks. Geeks write things down and have long memories.

>Why should they allow someone who freeloads to reverse engineer their software?

If the guy saw the source, he's not reverse engineering, he's copying from memory. If the guy didn't see the source, he's not freeloading.

Again, tell me how a license between Corp A and Corp B can stop US Citizen C from reverse-engineering something?

Re:Take aim at foot, Fire!

[Reliant-1864]

A lot of employees have been fired for what they do in their spare time. They might not be paid by the company, but they are still an employee. Employers will not just let slide if their employees are working for their competition in their spare time, and it's pretty understandable if a company's supplier gets miffed that they have an employee working in their spare time to compete against the supplier, especially with an non-compete agreement between the 2 parties

Re:Take aim at foot, Fire!

[Mournblade]

"Users that don't pay for the product, and thus, don't help support the development of that product. "

There are other ways to support development of a product:

1. Using said product and supplying bug reports and feature suggestions to the developer that improve the product for *all* of the product's users.

2. Using said product in a high-visibility project that instantly gives said product visibility and credibility it otherwise wouldn't have, leading other potential customers to at least consider using it.

By all accounts i've seen, Larry acknowledges that his product benefitted from having Linus use it - it's Larry offered Linux use of the free version of the software in the first place. Sort of like Nike paying Michael Jordan to wear their shoes. Note - I am in no way implying that this was a one-way deal. Both parties benefitted from this, however, many people were concerned that what has happened would happen (i.e. that once it was no longer convenient or necessary for Larry to provide the software to Linus (and others) for free, he would no longer do so, causing the developers to scramble to find an alternative).

Turns out they were correct.

Re:Take aim at foot, Fire!

[metamatic]

Surprisingly enough, almost exactly this scenario really happens, and results in children dying.

Companies (specifically Nestlé) give free infant formula to mothers in third world countries, marketing it as better than the free alternative. The mother uses the free milk, and her natural supply dries up. Then suddenly the rules change, and Nestlé demands cash for more milk. To add to the problem, she has to find a supply of clean water to mix the formula with, which can be problematic.

Even though Nestlé never say up front that they are offering an ongoing free supply of milk, they still get boycotted by many people who find their behavior immoral in the extreme.

So your attempt to show by analogy that BitKeeper have done nothing wrong, in fact fails to convince.

Re:Take aim at foot, Fire!

[Donny Smith]

Erh, my girlfriend offered me free sex and she implied that was to be an ongoing offer.
At first, I was concerned I was gonna become addicted to it, and so it happened. One day, she discovered that I was masturbating when she was away, and so now she demands 4 bucks every time I want to sleep with her.

Reverse engineering is pathetic and non-creative.
And yeah, the new version has one (1) developer. Hah! Great, I'll move all my source code (don't have any, luckily) to this stable and reliable new OSS version so that I can save one 10th of single developer's monthly paycheck (I actually don't know how much it costs)...
After the new system goes online, I will also voluteer for a white paper on how OSS saves money!

Re:Take aim at foot, Fire!

[rpdillon]

If reverse engineering is explicitly forbidden in a license, and someone has agreed to that license, then reverse engineering is illegal.

Well, that's the question, isn't it? You state this like it is obvious, but it isn't obvious. Reverse engineering for interoperability is protected under US copyright law AND the DMCA. In fact, there is at least one court case pending right now to determine this very issue. Read more about it here. Very interesting stuff.

Anyway, given that

1. The OSDL had the license
2. the employee was NOT employed by OSDL to do the reverse engineering and
3. reverse engineering is protected under copyright law

I could see OSDL suing BitMover for breach of contract, which seems backwards, but I really think it is questionable if they gave BitMover any cause to do this, and it is going to cost them dearly to migrate over the entire version history to a new format, especially from one that is proprietary and needs to be reverse engineered before the move can happen.

Freedom matters

[Concern]

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?

Re:Freedom matters

[squiggleslash]

I always find it ironic that most of those who flame RMS et al usually argue that they're just being ideological, and all those who disagree "just want to get things done" and "free software 'zealots' are just being impractical".

Nah. I was won over to free software because it's practical. I've never seen handing your data over to be managed by proprietary software product as "practical".

I'm kind of bitter that way as I've been using computers for a long time, since the early eighties, and have had too much experience of what happens when proprietary vendors do not support you any longer, even often with no malice intended, as the manufacturers of the Dragon 32, Sinclair QL, and Commodore Amiga can demonstrate. I switched to GNU/Linux. Because it was practical. Because I knew that I didn't have to rely on a third party for support, because I could help others and get the information I need to support others, because no matter what happened, I'd be able to continue with what I had.

Practical? You bet. Ideological? Perhaps, but only the same way as my dive instructor was "ideological", I mean he was obsessed with safety, obsessed I tell you! All I wanted to do was go down 60 feet and look at coral, but oooooooo noooooh! It's all "Buddy System" and "nitrogen levels" and other stuff.

Ok, that's facetious. The latter is about life and death. But there's no reason that the less serious nature of proprietary vs open and free should make me unconcerned about the issue.

Re:Freedom matters

[arkanes]

Of course it's reasonable for them to do this. But this is exactly why people didn't want to start using it in the first place - because you become beholden to the goodwill of a third party. That's an uncomfortable spot for anyone to be in, anywhere.

The fact that Larry is being pissy about a tenuous connection to a third party developer working on a BK alternative just makes him sound like an asshole. It was nice to read his little speech about accepting commercial developers, like any time a company releaases a commercial product for Linux all the OSS guys should cease work on anything to compete with it. That attitude is the whole reason OSS got started in the first place.

Re:Freedom matters

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

Linus "picked" Bitkeeper because Larry harangued him in Linus' home, around the release time of 2.4>

Linus was dropping important patches - cos his versioning was done from a mail spool.

Larry was writing Bitkeeper and had been pushing this for a couple years. Finally Linus gave in - saying there was a problem - and agreed to use a vcs that didn't get in his way. Then Larry made his pitch...

Re:Freedom matters

[Concern]

This is a process: the community learning the value of "freedom."

If I blame anyone, I blame the dismissive people who said this would never happen, and if it did, it wouldn't matter.

BitMover is doing what's best for BitMover. They had a sexy marketing line with "fake freedom" and it fooled some people. Who do you "blame?" The marketing department? Or the people they convinced?

This is not a story about a corporation "getting burned" because someone dared to create an open source version of their product. Excuse me, that's called competition, and you can't play that card without being fundamentally against open source, if not all competition.

This is a story about the dangers of non-free software - dangers that exist for everyone, for AT&T and IBM just as much as for Linux and Gnu hackers.

I just hope everyone, corporate or otherwise, learns from the experience. If we don't, we can blame ourselves.

Re:Freedom matters

[danheskett]

The fact is and remains, that for some people, and in many situations, the burden of switching between proprietary apps is still far, far, far less than the burden and lost productivity and time that is spent on F/OSS applications.

Even switching between F/OSS applications isn't fun. Ever had to migrate between sendmail and qmail? Or sendmail and postfix? Or postfix and qmail? All apps are "open" in that the source is still there, but they are both, actually, very proprietary. They all are configured differently, all use their own settings file, file naming conventions, and formats. It's open, but still, completely a mess.

You assume that if you choose a GNU/Linux app once, at one time, that you will stay with that, for all time. That's not the case in the real practical world of software use cases. People change, and their requirements change, and the software changes.

The theoretical, big picture idea that F/OSS is able to be maintained by anyone if the original maintainer disappears or abandons the project is of little use in most cases. I am a programmer, but frankly, if the PHP team stops maintaining PHP3 I am not going to keep up with bugfixes and security patches. I am going to bite the bullet and upgrade to PHP4/5. It's going to be a hassle, I'll have to deal with it. Sure, I could maintain those earlier 3.x builds, but I am not going to. It's a waste of time. It's a waste of effort. It's more work than its worth.

F/OSS is often practical, but trust me, I tell you from experience, it can often be as difficult, time consuming, and expensive to move between F/OSS platforms as from a proprietary solution to a new proprietary solution. It is no gurantee that because an app is free or open that it is flexible and easy to switch in and out of. Quite often proprietary solutions actually convert better between packages: at a client site I was contracted to "upgrade" their Windows based mail server. The replacement mail server package they wanted actually had a built in conversion between the competition and their own. Three clicks, and everything was done. Proprietary yes, but practical, very much so.

Re:Freedom matters

[drew]

i think that most (not all) people would have been a lot calmer about the issue had it not been for the license clause about not working on any competing projects. i can completely understand why somebody who worked on the kernel wouldn't like being told what other projects they could or couldn't work on in their spare time, just as i wouldn't appreciate my work telling me what i could and could not spend ny free time doing.

anyway, i think he's being a little blind if he thinks his organization is as friendy as any to open source. sure, they're friendly to open source, as long as it isn't competing with them. sorry buddy, that's not the way it works.

and his comment about marines and disciplining the 'bad apples' is nothing short of ludicrous. it's not up to the free software community to discipline somebody for the decisions they make on how to spend their free time.

Re:Freedom matters

[squiggleslash]

The fact is and remains, that for some people, and in many situations, the burden of switching between proprietary apps is still far, far, far less than the burden and lost productivity and time that is spent on F/OSS applications.

And in many situations, that is true. And in most situations, it's not important.

The different between FOSS and proprietary is this: for the former, I don't have to switch. For the latter, I do.

If Commodore Amiga's operating system had been Free Software, the chances are I'd still be using it today. It would, by now, have a community of developers built around it who would have kept it up to date, ported it to commodity hardware, etc.

So, to be honest, this kind of argument doesn't impress me. Why, exactly, do I need to switch from sendmail? I don't. I can't envisage needing to any time in the next decade, can you?

Why did I need to switch from AmigaOS? 'cos it was set in stone. There'd never likely be an update, and even if there was one, I'd be unlikely to obtain it, and it's unlikely it'd ever move forward very far.

Re:Freedom matters

[R.Caley]

What they are not fine with is people using the free version they give out to create a competitor that could help put them out of buisiness.

But that is, of course, not what seems to have happened. What happened, accordingto the write up, is that someone who had at some point been been payed some moeny by OSDN was, completely unrelatedly, working on a possibly competitive product. No one is claiming this contractor was using BK in his work on that product.

basicly BM's interpretation of the licence is that no one who has any connection, however tenuous, with an organisation using the free BK can work on a version control system. This looks to me to be a clause specifically created to be impossible for the licencee to police, and so to provide a way for BM to remove the licence on a whim.

Re:Freedom matters

[Fenris Ulf]

Actually, the gratis BitKeeper license *does* forbid building your own VCS from the ground up.

There is at least one linux developer who could not use BK because of his ties to subversion (or was it arch?).

Re:Freedom matters

[Hangtime]

And what is BitMover so upset about? That anyone would dare compete with them?

Yea the gall of someone to take there ball and go home after you played with it and then punched them in the face when he asked you not too, what audacity indeed.

No, there upset that the community went back on a simple promise.

Re:Freedom matters

[jimwelch]

Pain is still pain. My IDE at work (MS shop) was using codewright which is now gone.

Re:Freedom matters

[danheskett]

My experience is that it's exactly the same ballpark.

I have two clients that I installed at similiar times (1999).

One client was an always strong MS shop, and got a new Windows 2000 server, and workstations. Another client got a RedHat 5.2 release against the whole network. Windows 2000 is still very much supported. RedHat 5.2 is literally, what, like 5 major versions back. It has been a huge pain for me to maintain. For a while I compiled my own updates for them. Then, I worked up upgrading them to a new version of RedHat. Then RedHat discontinued their whole line, and I can either buy a distro or use Fedora. Meanwhile MS has a roadmap, laid out, that details when things will change. Still getting updates for the same product. Still chugging along without a single app being "force" upgraded. Office 2000 + Win2k. It's a fine solution. They are looking for faster machines with more storage space and bigger monitors, better connections (FireWire, USB 2.0, etc) pretty quick , and they'll get them plus the latest software from MS. And everything will be fine.

I lost the RedHat client and they went to someone who provided them with a Solaris based network with Sparc stations.

My point is unless you are prepared to get personally into the source code you can't plan on any specific package being supported once it's not trendy anymore. The name brandpackages - the kernel, X, php, mysql, apache - sure they'll probably always be supported by someone somewhere for free. Great. But the thousands of little niche packages - they die off all the time, and are replaced. If you build your company website from a FOSS CMS package, a in a few years you may have to move it to a new one because the current one died and you dont have the time or skill to maintain it and upgrade it on your own. If you selected a proprietary package, you could be in the same boat if the company went tits up or discontinued the product. This could absolutely happen.

I don't dispute that FOSS gives you a leg up in this regard. It is better than proprietary, but not enough to make any FOSS package a better deal automatically than a comparable proprietary package. The nature of FOSS is something to put in the "benefits" category, but not necessarily something that is an automatic deal-closer.

If you are a hardcore system program, or can hack these packages, or have staff to handle it, great. Go for it. Go all to the nines. But, for (1) individuals that are not terribly geeky and (2) small businesses up to medium sized businesses, the case becomes much more muddled. It's automatically a better deal to go FOSS.

See.

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Too Obvious Answer

[4of12]

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.

Considering what has transpired, the obvious choice is subversion:)

Re:Too Obvious Answer

[MartinG]

Subversion is not the obvious choice because its nothing like bitkeeper.

Have you ever used bitkeeper? It is highly distributed in the way it works.

Subversion on the other hand is very much like cvs (except it doesn't suck)

Re:Too Obvious Answer

[Anonymous Coward]

no not subversion ... subversion is like cvs++ what the kernel guys want is something like cvs# so better start looking at arch .

Re:Too Obvious Answer

[Anonymous Coward]

Considering what has transpired, the obvious choice is subversion:)

I, unlike the rest of these boobs, understood your joke.

Re:Too Obvious Answer

[bradkittenbrink]

Subversion has distributed add-ons. For example, svk (I have not personally used it, but have heard good things). Subversion is more than just a version control system, it is more like a version control architecture. Take a look at all the related projects here. Most people just need cvs-replacement functionality, but there are certainly more options than that. I think it has a very good chance of catching up with BitKeeper shortly.

ps - now that I look at it again, it appears that svk has grown beyond a subversion add-on and supports other repository architectures.

Re:Too Obvious Answer

[Florian]

> Considering what has transpired, the obvious
> choice is subversion:)

This would rather surprise me because svn doesn't support distributed repositories and branches which are necessary to maintain the different kernel branches.

Re:Too Obvious Answer

[Omnifarious]

A million people have probably told you this already, but...

I'm a big fan of Subversion myself, but it isn't at all appropriate for kernel development due to the distributed nature of kernel development. Subversion is a very centralized version control system.

Re:Too Obvious Answer

[Wateshay]

Using which storage backend? BerkeleyDB or the filesystem-based storage system?

Are you sure it was really that much slower with a huge repository? Or just with a huge working copy?

Subversion is not universally faster than CVS (checkouts and imports can be significantly slower, but you don't do those very often anyway), but it's generally faster where it counts. It also scales very nicely (for the most part), and I'd be surprised if correct use of SVN was really that much slower, even at 120K files. (I've never had a repository that big, but people talk about having them that big on the mailing list all the time.) One place where it might be slow is if you have a working copy with 120K files in it and try to do an update or commit from the top-level WC directory, since that would require SVN to locally crawl the whole WC tree. There is work being done to improve the places where SVN still lacks in speed, though.

As for being unusable around 1000 files? That's a bunch of crap. I use a >5000 file working copy every single day (>20000 file repos), and it is VERY zippy.

Re:Too Obvious Answer

[kfogel]

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

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

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

In it for the money

[Kevster]

Note that Larry McVoy has pointed out that the number of improvements to the commercial version due to suggestions from Open Source developers has been dropping sharply. To me, that means "giving free copies to these guys has been beneficial to my bottom line, but isn't doing much for me lately, in the financial sense". It sounds like this reverse-engineering issue is a smokescreen, a scapegoat for cutting off the "freeloaders" (those contributing to improving the product).

So, he's in it for the money. Is anyone surprised?

Re:In it for the money

[Wizy]

I am all for free and open source software. But can you fault someone for trying to make a profit? Dont you like eating?

When giving out the free version looks like it will start to HURT the bottom line, as the head a company with employees (who need to get paid) he has to reconsider things.

Re:In it for the money

[ivan256]

But giving out the free version *wasn't* hurting the bottom line. Starting to charge for the free version isn't going to get the people who were using it to start paying, instead it's likely to get them to find some other tool. It's not like source control packages aren't a dime a dozen...

In the past developers were exposed to bitkeeper through work on the Linux kernel. Then there was the possibility that through that exposure they would recommend BitKeeper for the proprietary projects they build on top of linux. This model seemed to work well due to the 'open comments' rule. (Anybody using the free version had their commit comments posted for all to see on the bitkeeper website).

Now there is no high profile exposure for bitkeeper. They're about to lose the best free advertizing they ever had. In two years nobody will be using bitkeeper at all.

Re:In it for the money

[Wizy]

It was hurting the bottom line. As he says in the article it costs them money to develop both versions since the open source one has different requirements from the commercial one.

It takes time and resources away from the commercial one as well. With all of that, it was hurting the bottom line now that they werent getting enough return on the investment.

Re:In it for the money

[nagora]

With all of that, it was hurting the bottom line now that they werent getting enough return on the investment.

Except that every copy sold is a return on the investment in the early stages, which will continue into the future. What he's actually saying is that there isn't enough of an *increase* in the return on the investment.

Put it this way: is Larry going to take out all the improvements due to bug-hunting and suggestions now that the Kernel is leaving? I don't think so.

Nothing was preventing them from forking the product and just saying "Free version now bug-fixes only, guys", but old Larry wanted his cake and eat it too: free publicity, free testing, free design ideas, and a no-compete clause. Great if you can get it.

TWW

More info

[Virtual Karma]

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

Re:Oh great...

[Anonymous Coward]

For everyone who doesn't unterstand this. It was an April fool.

Classic Heroin Marketing

[The Angry Mick]

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.

Re:Classic Heroin Marketing

[Citizen of Earth]

Let's hope that the impending avalanche of negativity will influence BitKeeper to reconsider at least a token giveback to the Linux community.

Let's hope that it doesn't.

What tool to move to?

[stratjakt]

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.

Re:What tool to move to?

[archeopterix]

Subversion, of course.

Subversion doesn't come close to being replacement for BitKeeper. Not that it's a bad tool - it just doesn't support distributed repositories at all. Different philosophy.

Subversion, of course. What else is there? RCS? CVS?

Arch and Darcs, for starters.

Re:What tool to move to?

[mattyrobinson69]

you mean like linux, freebsd, openbsd, netbsd, etc?

or maybe openoffice, koffice, abiword (sortof), gnumeric (sortof), etc?

maybe mozilla, konqueror?

bochs/qemu?

bash/sh/csh/tsh?

Re:What tool to move to?

[geegs]

In the postscript to his announcement on moving away from BitKeeper, Linus rules out Subversion and states that Monotone "seems to be the most viable alternative".

Until I read that I had never heard of Monotone.

Re:What tool to move to?

[natet]

I'm suprised I haven't heard SVK mentioned yet. It uses the subversion file system, but uses the concept of distributed repositories, much like bitkeeper or arch. I can't vouch for its performance, as I have not used it on a large project, but it seems like it could be a possible replacement for bitkeeper.

Re:What tool to move to?

[jgarzik]

Subversion is not the tool we will be moving to.

Don't take my word for it, read the official statement from the subversion developers, "Please Stop Bugging Linus Torvalds About Subversion".

The kernel development model, as molded by BitKeeper, needs a highly decentalized model which encourages forks as a way of staging kernel changes.

Re:Bitkeeper

[0123456]

"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.

KDE is moving to subversion

[Dani Filth]

...perhaps the kernel will follow.

Bazaar-NG might step in?

[KhaZ]

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. :)

Why change?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Why change?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not just Linus that uses Bitkeeper, it's everyone that's working on the kernel. Because they're not giving out the free version any more, nobody that doesn't already have it can submit patches (or at least, the procedure is a lot less simple).

Re:Why change?

[BRSloth]

If I got the article correctly, the free version will be terminated, some time. So, this would mean that every free version would become ilegal if not purchased.

Re:Why change?

[Elwood P Dowd]

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.

It's not a problem for the time being. However, they have to move off BK in the near future. At least some of the product is hosted at "bkbits", whatever that is. Also, I believe that the BK folks can revoke the free license for people that are already using it, making it illegal to use. They may also refuse to sell a commercial license to those people who have lost their free licenses.

So yeah, it requires replacement if the BK folks say it does, and the friction got significant enough that Linus wants to make it happen. Linus has tried to make it sound like he & Larry McEvoy (?) have amicably come to this agreement. That may be the case. Larry isn't getting anything out of his free version anymore, and Linus isn't Vivien Leigh. He doesn't want to depend on the kindness of strangers.

Re:Oh great...

[Wizy]

Of course that was posted on April 1st....

Re:Linus Shminus

[Mant]

It is important to other people working on the kernel though.

Idiots

[b0lt]

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

Re:Idiots

[gosand]

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?

Not really. If companies have licensed their software, they are probably under some contract. And they have probably had enough time to transition all their code into it. Transitioning out is much harder. BitMover already has the signed deals, it doesn't MATTER the reasoning WHY companies signed the deals. If someone signed up based solely on the fact that Linus used it, then they are fools in the business world. But without fools, there would be no business world as we know it.

The real question is, if they are able to, will it be worth it for these companies to move off of BitKeeper now? I am guessing for a large enough percentage, the answer is no - and THAT is how BitMover wins. That is how business works for the most part, like it or not.

What tool, you ask?

[geniusj]

Perforce is free for open source development.. for now.. ;-)

and thus, R.Stallman was right after all

[N3wsByt3]

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.

Re:and thus, R.Stallman was right after all

[Mant]

If you follow some of the links from the article, it talks about productivity doubling since using BitKeeper.

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.

So from the practical, rather than ideological, point of view, even with dropping it now it may still have been the best choice.

Re:and thus, R.Stallman was right after all

[dewright_ca]

That kind of reasoning does not fit this issue.

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. 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.

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.

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.

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.

Make Sense?

Re:and thus, R.Stallman was right after all

[kebes]

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"

So linus apparently thinks that the increased productivity over the three years is enough to offset the pain that he must now endure to switch to a new system. (We'll have to ask Linus again after he actually endures the switch!) So from the pragmatic point of view, there is still a valid argument for using a superior product, even if support may discontinue at any time. It is a calculated risk that may be more efficient in the long run.

That having been said, I strongly support OSS and free software on ideological grounds, but Linus' argument has always been one of productivity, not ethics.

Re:and thus, R.Stallman was right after all

[markov_chain]

It seems now, after all, it was R.Stallman all along.

Suppose someone lends you a car, and you drive a 1000 miles in a month. That someone shows up and takes the car away because he suddenly stops liking you. Do you say, "Damn, I knew it! We should have kept walking" or "Oh well, at least we made good progress for a month?" How can you ignore the progress the kernel devs made in their process while using bk? Furthermore, it looks like some of the delegation skills that bk forced upon Linus, that sped up kernel development, may actually work with any version control system and thus lead to permanent improvement.

Re:and thus, R.Stallman was right after all

[Just Some Guy]

Suppose someone lends you a car [...]

...and tells you that you can use it as much as you want, as long as you don't use it to transport parts for other cars. You switch your entire corporate fleet to this car, which would ordinarily be prohibitively expensively but is a lot better than the offerings at Joe's Free Car Lot. You come to depend on those loaner cars.

Some guy at an unrelated company looks at the loaner car's ignition system to see if he could make it work on one of the models available at Joe's Free Car Lot. Your "friend" responds by yanking everyone's loaner cars.

What do you do next? Try to find someone else to loan you an expensive car? Buy a new fleet of your own? Or decide that helping Joe upgrade his fleet to everyone's mutual benefit is a worthy investment?

Re:and thus, R.Stallman was right after all

[Hangtime]

Excellent analogy and good point. I would refine it further for this piece.

Your friends want to go out of state but you drive a Ford POS and don't feel comfortable driving it that far. A kind stranger upon hearing this has two cars and doesn't drive the late-model Toyota Camary and tells you you can drive it if you just help make repairs on it. The stranger also says not to drive out of state because his insurance won't cover you if you do.

Your group of friends howl at this and say you should be able to drive anywhere you want. Go ahead and take your Ford POS they say will work on it making it better and if you break down will give you a boost. Against their wishes you decide to take the Camary.

The first few months are great, you have a good car and you return the favor by putting a stereo in it, tires, get it washed regularly, etc. You and the stranger are both happy. Then your group of friends start telling you "the car looks to good, he's going to sell it, lets take it out while we still can." You resist but later find find out your friends took the car out anyway across the state.

The stranger finds out and asks you not to do it again, but your friends just knowing that the stranger is going to sell it decide to do it again anyway.

The stranger at this point cannot trust you so he decides to sell the car. Your friends all howl once again telling you "We told you so, we told you should have just worked on the Ford and that he would sell it."

So whose at fault,

The stranger for loaning you a good car and taking all the changes you made with him.

You for using the car for a couple of months and being able to get around well instead of in the Ford POS.

The group of friends who told you the stranger would sell the car at some point but also took it joyriding.

You make the call.

Big Mistake

[dmh20002]

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.

Re:Big Mistake

[jemfinch]

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.

The Linux Kernel, then, might have moved to that open source competitor. And that would look tons worse than what has actually happened.

It's like a relationship. Given the choice, you want to break up with your significant other. Such a situation (for social reasons somewhat opaque to me) is far preferable to having your significant other break up with you.

With this move, BitMover was preemptively "breaking up" with Linux, before Linux had a chance to do the same.

Jeremy

Larry never got it

[nagora]

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

TWW

Freedom over Function

[codepunk]

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.

hmpf

[N3wsByt3]

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.

From the article...

[mshiltonj]

...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.

Re:From the article...

[mshiltonj]

Clearly, many corporations *do* use Word

Yes, and this may be the *second* most stupid thing I've every heard.

Huh?

[ABCC]

About 50 posts and nobody has suggested the possibility that M$ could have paid off Bitkeeper in a move to "hurt" linux, has everyone left their conspiracy hats at home today?

But he is honest

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

McVoy dismisses fundamental Free Software positions, while claiming "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 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.

Re:But he is honest

[smittyoneeach]

Now, underneath all that whitewash, what do you really think, JC?

Re:Linus Shminus

[LordNimon]

Obviously, you've never used BitKeeper.

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.

Sources Report Otherwise

[sabat]

Sources are reporting that BitKeeper's decision was primarily based on Linus' refusal to PAY THE $599 SCO LICENSE FEE.

McVoy is an idiot

[codemachine]

"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.

Re:McVoy is an idiot

[Elwood P Dowd]

He does have an excellent point, though. Open Source programmers are not in the Marine Corps.

Re:BitMover is in the right

[KenBot_314]

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.

Linus' side of the story

[pixelbeat]

on the linux kernel mailing list

Re:Linus' side of the story

[hey]

At the end he says monotone seems like the best replacement.

Re:BitMover is in the right

[sqlrob]

You have less respect for OSDL since they basically said "What an employee does on his own time is his own business?"

and thus, R.Stallman was right after all (2)

[N3wsByt3]

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

Re:Oh great...

[pherthyl]

Oh course, outside of April 1, they are moving their entire source tree to subversion.

This will soon prove (or disprove) the viability of subversion for very large projects. Linux kernel development model is significantly different though, so what works for KDE might not work for the kernel.

Something I'm not clear on

[ShieldW0lf]

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?

Re:Something I'm not clear on

[Daniel Phillips]

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?

Sure. It doesn't matter, and we don't care.

This is a great day for Linux, and Linus for that matter. Oh, and me.

Re:Something I'm not clear on

[ShieldW0lf]

I quoted from one of the bottom paragraphs in the article and asked for clarification. Do you honestly think I didn't read the damned thing already?

What I want to know is, how do these large companies that are making contributions to linux like IBM etc track the tree and submit their patches etc through BitKeeper as McVoy stated they would continue to do when Linus and Co no longer have access to it?

BTW, if you're going to get all arrogant and open your post with "RTFA", perhaps you could RTFQ next time and answer it instead of just flapping your gums.

Re:Something I'm not clear on

[mwburden]

I motion that Phil be banned from Slashdot for actually ANSWERING THE QUESTION instead of telling the original poster to RTFA (which didn't have the answer to the question) or raving about the benifits of using Bitkeeper (which doesn't answer the ramifications of a project that includes some developers that are using it and some that aren't).

We expect better from you in the future, Phil!

Re:What else is comparable?

[brettw]

They dropped Teamware because Larry left. Teamware is BK's immediate predecessor.

In my experience, nothing has all of these things. I use BK at work, but before I ended up there I tried pretty much everything.

Like Larry himself says, BK doesn't have a killer feature. It has a great model and lots of little features that hang together well.

I hope this event will push open source SCM development to approach the quality of BK.

BitMover is in the right (but only legally)

[Otto]

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.

"people who would have worked on the kernel"

[jbellis]

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?

Wha?

[abulafia]

I'm not sure where you get that. One of my repositories is ~280K files, and it is _far_ faster than when we had it under CVS. Perhaps you have a config issue... Add in the fact that the architecture lets you do a lot of things locally and you're inherently much faster than CVS on those operations.

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.

let's use a better analogy

[N3wsByt3]

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.

From a Jan 2003 LW article on McVoy

[veg_all]

Interesting quote from a 2003 Linux World artcle on McVoy and the adoption of BK by Linus:

I asked McVoy if the flak he gets from zealots on the LKML is bad enough to make him do what Perens and others have suggested he might do, which is to take it all back and not allow open source developers free use of the product. McVoy thought for a few moments and we talked about other things before responding fully. "To answer your earlier question, will we ever take it away? McVoy said. "I don't think we will ever take it away, but I may very well take me away."

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.

Did you run your repository on a 486?

[jbellis]

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.

Re:BitMover is in the right

[LordNimon]

OSDL should have made the contractor sign an NDA that said the contractor would not violate any agreement that OSDL had with any other company. That's par for the course with contractors. When I was a contractor, I signed similar agreements.

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.

Freedom or not, that was to be expected

[gsasha]

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.

Observations

[wowbagger]

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.

Not idiots, but self defeating

[NatteringNabob]

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.

Re:BitMover is in the right

[LordNimon]

There's nothing slimy about the license. BitMover provided a free version of their product, which costs them $500K/year to develop and support, in exchange for a promise not to use BK to develop a competing product. What's wrong with that?

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.

Wheel reinvention

[metamatic]

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...

More examples

[metamatic]

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.

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 .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.)

too slow

[Fourier]

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.

distributed repositories...

[bani]

on the other hand, svk does support distributed repositories. and it works with subversion.

RCS and CVS are definitely non-starters.

Alternative to BitKeeper

[saldek]

If they're looking for a replacement I hear Visual SourceSafe is supposed to be quite good.

Apple's UFS improvements are in FreeBSD

[nutznboltz]

Apple wrote a utility to stress test UFS and debugged the code for Darwin and the bug fixes made it into FreeBSD.

Re:Bitkeeper

[neutralstone]

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.

Lots of programmers do not regard them poorly -- Linus included. From his post this morning:

"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."

It seems to me that the only programmers who really view BitMover poorly at this point are those who adopted the view that all software should be FLOSS. They happen to be the same ones who, in general, tend not to pay for binary-only software. In other words, I don't see how BitMover will lose sales from people who weren't customers anyway. And I don't see how this move affects existing customers or potential customers, who are obviously willing to lay down money for the best tool said money can buy.

Larry's comments seem not to disagree with this reasoning. From TFA:

When asked if he was concerned about this resulting in the creation of a project that ultimately competes with BitKeeper, Larry replied, "yes, of course. We'd be idiots to not be." However, he then went on to point out some reasons that this was unlikely. In maintaining two products, he was suprised to learn that the needs of the open source community was much different than the needs of the commercial community.

...so I think BitMover will be around for some time to come. A good thing too, because they're kicking ass and indications are that future versions of BK will further impress.

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.

What Linus Has to say on Linux-Kernel

[berck]

Actually, I think he did.

Here's what Linus had to say about it today.

GO TO HELL

[argoff]

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.

Re:Free software and open source are not the same.

[Bruce Perens]

Do not accuse me, or the Open Source movement, of dismissing software freedom. That's Eric Raymond's individual gig, and perhaps that of some other people who should know better. The deprecation of Stallman and Free Software was an unfortunate thing that Eric did. I didn't condone it and have never approved of it. I have always considered Open Source to be a gentle introduction to Stallman's philosophy for business people. Once people are using the software, they will be willing to learn more.

Bruce

Linus in the Marines

[SlashDread]

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!!

Re:Maybe using BK *wasn't* a mistake.

[schon]

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?

That entirely depends on how much productivity we gained, versus how much was (and will be) lost due to the transitions, whether or not that same (or a similar) productivity gain would have been realized if Linus had chosen an open-source SCCM from the beginning.

Re:So develop software that NEEDS support

[idontgno]

So instead of developing easy to use software that doesn't need support, people should really develop useful but hard to use software that has support costs.

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.

LK thread on how it all got started

[vingufta]

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

resounding open source failure!

[the-build-chicken]

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.

Ah, but _that_ is why this is such Good News.

[refactored]

..it seems to fill a void, or will once it is mature enough.

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.

Take a look at monotone

[Kent Recal]

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...

Re:Take a look at monotone

[tupshin]

I absolutely agree with the syntax being an issue with arch, but as a long time (1+ years) user of darcs for an active OSS project, I completely disagree abouts darcs. Darcs has the simplest syntax of any comparable tool that I've encountered.

I'm curious what aspect of the darcs syntax you disagree with?

Re:Features Subversion lacks vs Bitmover

[JoeF]

Subversion's Open Letter on this topic:
http://subversion.tigris.org/subversion-linus.html

Re:Viable FOSS business models

[DavidTC]

Likewise, I can't understand why they sell motor oil to consumers. Sure, only a few people use it, but is destroying 10% of the lube business worth it?

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.

Re:You missed the point

[xswl0931]

Let me clarify the point I was trying to make. Someone had said that you cannot make money by producing free software. In the case where this is a hobby and you have a regular job, this is not an issue. In the case where you want to make this your career or make a business of producing free software, I argue that it is difficult if not impossible to produce both good software (meaning no money from support) and free software while making a living from it. You seem to be agreeing with my point.

it's amazing how wrong

[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.

And I care, why?

[UN1XG0D]

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.

Bitkeeper sucks! Subversion rules!

[rice_burners_suck]

Why, Linus will use Perforce, of course!

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.

Linus should amend the GPL

[melted]

With the following:

This license explicitly forbids running BitKeeper.

There you frikkin' go, Larry, half of your business is GONE. :0)

Re:which storage backend

[Wateshay]

I use BDB. I keep meaning to move to FSFS, but just haven't properly motivated myself.