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.

Comments

When Is Reverse Engineering Wrong?

[globalar]

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?

Re:Interesting

[jc42]

My thoughts, too. So far, I haven't seen any explanation of why the phrase "reverse engineering" is being used. If Tridge's comments are correct, the phrase just doesn't seem to apply.

Usually, "reverse engineering" means that I've written code that does what someone else's code does, and I wrote it after studying the other code's behavior but not the code itself. Now, maybe Tridge saw the BK code, maybe he didn't; I can't tell. But it seems that what he wrote doesn't really mimic what BK did. He was adding a new capability as a sort of add-on. So his work fails to satisfy the first part of the definition, and isn't "reverse engineering".

But I haven't really seen much in the way of details.

Could someone who says that "reverse engineering" is involved please explain 1) how you define the phrase, and 2) why it applies in this case?

It's always good to get a common definition of terms before we start condemning someone for doing something that they say they didn't do.

Re:Zealotry?

[Sanity]

I know that it's heresy to say this on slashdot, but it sounds like things were running pretty fine until rabid open-source zealotry reared its ugly head.

I see nothing ugly about a guy's desire to use free software, and to put the work in to make it happen, in fact it is exactly the spirit that drives the free software movement.

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.

Re:Reverse engineering

[jc42]

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?

Re:weak answer from Tridge

[Jeremy Allison - Sam]

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.

Re:What?

[TCM]

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.