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

Re:weak answer from Tridge

[winkydink]

I'm going to disagree with you. It is immoral to reverse engineer while relying on the goodwill of the people you are reverse engineering. If you can't see that, I can't explain it any more clearly.

Zealotry?

[kirkb]

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.

Although BK has always been a source of controversy among kernel developers, fans of BK were happy and productive using it, while anti-BKers were also happy and productive, using whatever other SCM software they wanted. So everything's kosher.

Then this 'Tridge' guy comes along, and is *so* opposed to BK that he is determined to fight against it using tactics that are legal, but not especially moral, ethical, or friendly. Then, while a temporary cease-fire is arranged so that the matter can be discussed and resolved maturely, he violates this truce.

So now that so much happiness and productivity has been ruined, are the license zealots happy? I hope so.

Re:My opinion hasn't changed

[bonch]

But in this post, Linus says he was writing scripts to export data in an SCM-independent format. McVoy actually offered to support this directly in BitKeeper, but Tridge insisted on "being difficult about it" and gaining access directly to the binary data. Linus suggests he's bitter at Tridge for it, and now he can't use BitKeeper.

Re:weak answer from Tridge

[R55]

Larry McVoy is the criminal not Tridgell!
If Torvalds never, used BitKeeper and promoted it, Mr. McVoy would have less head weight.

Re:Definitely disagree with McVoy

[glesga_kiss]

Sure, Larry might not like people cloning his program. Well, tough. A clone is what is needed for interoperability.

This has NOTHING to do with interoperability. There were clients available already for the platform, and it didn't produce closed-format output (a source checkout).

Tridge was license cracking. BK is charged per-client and he was attempting to get around that. Sure, his solution would have been OSS, but that wasn't the drive behind it.

Have none of you worked with licensed software before? I don't know a single vendor that would be happy for someone to make a client that did not respect their licensing. Perhaps BK's business model is to distribute the server and make money from per-seat cost (I don't know). This client would sink their business. They gotta eat.

This almost always happens.

[Futurepower(R)]

MOD PARENT UP!!!

What the parent does not mention, however, is that this almost always happens. Commercial software companies almost always do something that causes problems for their users. They raise prices, declare premature death of their products (Microsoft has more than 100,000,000 Windows 98 users, but they say the product is dead.), or become adversarial in other ways.

FIX THE SLASHDOT MODERATION SYSTEM!!! Moderators can only moderate discussions in which they have no interest in contributing.

People like me, who have excellent karma, never get moderation points. Why? I don't know, and there is no way to learn.

The parent comment was at +3 when I began writing this comment. Now it is at -1. Did a Slashdot employee moderate it down? Was there a kind of censorship?

Re:why is it wrong to engineer?

[winkydink]

I dunno, that sounds to me a lot like justifying screwing someone's wife by saying something like, "hey she was passed out in my bedroom".