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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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Curiouser and curiouser.
And, incidentally, since Larry is so offended by Tridge's reverse engineering, I take it that he's taken the moral stand, and backed up his strong principles by making sure that none of BitMover's employees use Samba, either at work or in their spare time.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
Reverse engineering is perfectly legitimate, and excellent products have emerged because of it, such as Samba.
What is interesting is if other open-source projects will follow Linus' footsteps. KDE, I believe, still uses BK.
It seems that Larry McVoy has a fine line between a replacement and reverse-engineering (in this case compatibility?).
From the article (Torvald's statement):
" What Larry is _not_ fine with, is somebody writing a free replacement by just reverse-engineering what _he_ did."
I always am sympathetic to reverse engineering efforts, because frankly interoperability is ultimately a good thing. I am not sure what sort of principle we can follow if reverse-engineering is bad in this case. Where is the line? Is it a property line?
On the other hand, I see plenty that is ugly about BitMover trying to impose the terms of their license on a guy who apparently didn't even use their software to build a free replacement for it.
Once I waive the cloud of zealot spray away from my face a bit, I still have the same question: How is reverse engineering BK right when the company he worked for said it wouldn't in a legal agreement? Isn't this what happned? moral or immoral doesn't count. BK had a standard clause (look at any software licence and you'll probabaly see it) that said you can use our product as long as you don't use the product against us. OSDL agreed (through Linus I believe) that they wouldn't reverse engineer. They said so in a legal agreement (licence). There is someone under thier pay reverse engineering it.
Argue on the right and wrong of such an agreement in the first place. Argue on the details of how far the agreement reaches. The first is about something in the past. The second is about somethign going on now. But, They are really different arguments. And to claim no problems exists seems kinda funny to me since the licence doesn't just go away because you don't like it.
AB HOC POSSUM VIDERE DOMUM TUUM
a) Corruption. BK is a complicated system, there are >10,000 replicas of the BK database holding Linux floating around. If a problem starts moving through those there is no way to fix them all by hand. This happened once before, a user tweaked the ChangeSet file, and it costs $35,000 plus a custom release to fix it.
I really don't get how a single ChangeSet file could wreak havoc to all those repositories out there.
The other guys told their side of the story. He could tell his. For example, I'd like to know
There could be great answers to all of these things. I could even make up some reasonable guesses. But until he speaks up, we'll never know. Maybe he has a genius master plan to advance open-source projects everywhere, the Linux kernel included. Maybe he's just an ultra-dork obsessed with his legal right to reverse-engineer something, giving no thought to the practical results. I hope for the former, but based on what Linus and McVoy said, I fear it's the latter.
Linux is basically a reverse engineered Unix.
A bit of pickiness is in order here. Strictly speaking, linux was an independent implementation of POSIX, not Unix(TM). Yes, POSIX was a rubber-stamping of Unix Sys/V as an industry standard. But the distinction is important, legally and ethically. When governments require that you follow an official standard if you are to sell to them, it's really not right to tell me that I can't follow the standard without getting into legal trouble with some corporation. Publishing a spec as an official standard should give me permission to build tools to the standard. This is what Linux did, and everyone outside SCO seems to agree that it was legal.
Saying it's "reverse engineering" to implement a published, official standard stretches the meaning of the phrase so far that it becomes nearly meaningless. Next I expect to hear that if I use meters or grams, I'm "reverse engineering" a measurement system.
Of course, this doesn't really apply to the current discussion, since BK isn't exactly a published standard.
I'm still looking for an explanation of exactly what Tridge did that qualifies as "reverse engineering". TFA and other supposed explanations don't seem to explaining anything. I can't tell what the offending code actually did, and why it's considered "reverse engineering". Tridge seems to say that it did something that BK didn't do already. Or am I misreading something?
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
Indeed. I've been staying out of this as I know too much about what really happened to comment publicly.
But one thing I will say is that tridge has done *nothing* wrong in this matter.
As for his short reply to the question, unfortunately this is for reasons outside his control.
Jeremy Allison,
Samba Team.
Lesson #1:
From what I can tell, BitMover got involved with the Linux kernel for very little or no money. Expecting a return from giving your product away for free and expecting return in the form of corporate profit is a huge mistake when it appears the business model is product (not support/integration service) oriented.
Lesson #2:
Every good idea gets reversed engineered. Take it as a compliment that your software is being reversed engineered. In this article and judging by some of the comments, it's not viewd as complimentary and it might land the parties in court. (I won't get started with the problems with American IP)
Personal Opinion and Off-Topic:
(Here's where I get modded down) Reverse engineering should be valued as an accomplishment in American culture. A reverse-engineered product is typically lower in cost and innovates because more consumers can afford it.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
Bitmover hosts the project for you and instructs you to use their client to work with the server.
Wait a second, that is how BitKeeper works? _They_ host the server and you use a non-free client to access it? And Linux uses _that_ as its main repository? Someone wake me please.
Of course it runs NetBSD. BTC: 1NT7QvbetmANwaMzhpVL6
It is a bit disturbing, isn't it? Almost as disturbing as these various people trying to claim that Tridge is immoral and/or evil for reverse-engineering Bitkeeper's file format(s) and/or network protocol(s). Bizarre.
I've lost a fair chunk of respect for Linus over this. Mind you, Linus has a hell of a lot of my respect he can easily afford to lose :), but the cheek of him slagging off Tridge (when Tridge almost certainly did nothing wrong) is pretty offensive.
I'm glad it's finally over and Larry has taken his bat and ball and gone home to sulk. Maybe he can buy himself a few new toys with that half a million per year (or whatever) he'll now be saving in free-bitkeeper-maintenance costs *roll of eyes*.
As an aside, (begin sarcasm) I've often wondered how it is that FreeBSD can possibly maintain a kernel even remotely comparable to the Linux kernel. After all, they use CVS, which is the crappiest source control system there is... right? :-)
Probably something to do with the fact that while the horse was giving rides to one Linus it was also biting bystanders, kicking anyone who ever even thought about getting another horse and kept leaving copious amounts of manure on various people's front lawns. Not to mention that after a short while it became apparent that the "gift horse" was not in fact a horse at all but an obnoxious ass named Larry dressed up in horse-skin who concocted the whole sharade in order to satisfy his greed and pitiful need for accolades for his "unique" and oh-so-impossibly-clever Capital Horse Idea(tm). So after the ass was indeed beaten and its teeth pulled before it run away heehoing, Linus was left with a decaying horse-skin of sentimental value to him and a lot of people with clean lawns and out of range of hoofs and thus much better for it. And the world kept on turning...