BitKeeper Love Triangle: McVoy, Linus and Tridge
erktrek writes "NewsForge has given a brief interview to the parties involved in the (inevitable?) BitKeeper debacle." Here is some of our previous coverage.
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While I agree with your general statements, I believe you are side stepping the issue.
This code was donated to the OS community under a "condition". The problem is no one can be "fired" from the OS community and therefore it was only a matter of time before the "condition" was violated. BitKeeper did a tremendous service for the Linux Kernel development community and this is how the community eventually and inevitably paid it back.
Short story: OS can do a lot, but making a "pact" with the OS community that cannot be enforced is probably a foolish choice.
-Nuke the moon
And that's why we have this licence called GPL, to stop people just stealing code (as someone would clain what a BSD licence would amount to). "Share and enjoy" is the mantra, not "don't piss me off you buggers or I'll take your toy away". If I dislike all closed source systems why shouldn't I dislike this McVoy as well?
As everyone with a gram of brain pointed out: reverse engineering is a legitimate action and should not be banned. If McVoy thinks he is such a brilliant programmer and only he can think of such thing he has a thing coming.
What really pissed me off (and this was ages ago) was the fact that he arbitrarily changed the licence as he felt like in the past and the most annoying one was preventing anyone using his precious product while writing an other revision control system which is complete bollocks.
What the BK licence boils down to is: "I'm great and don't try to duplicate what I've done 'cause only I'm capable of coming up with something like this. If you accidentally type some code similar to or better than my system, you're a liar, you reverse-engineered my precious product and you are going to burn in hell! And just to make you more evil in other people's eyes, I'll revoke EVERYONE's licences, not only yours! Bwhahahahhahahahah".
What a fucktard...