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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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Reverse engineering is particularly warrented for the purposes of interoperability, and this seems to have been the motivation of Andrew "Tridge" Tridgell. He wasn't reverse engineering BitKeeper to "steal" McVoy's ideas, he was doing it so that he could gain access to the Linux kernel without using non-free tools. McVoy's position is one that you might expect from Microsoft on Samba, but not from someone that claims to support the ideals of free software.
Bottom line? I'm with Tridge on this one, McVoy is wrong, what he wants and seems to expect is effectively patent-level protection of his ideas.
Wow, that is definitely one video I definitely wouldn't want to look for a torrent of.
Larry has a very clear moral standpoint: "You can compete with me, but you can't do so by riding on my coat-tails. Solve the problems on your own, and compete _honestly_. Don't compete by looking at my solution."
Hmm.. and where does that end? Is it dishonest to not re-invent the wheel for your new automobile? This is a tricky area because outright copying of someone elses work without their permission is not right, but figuring out how someone else has solved a problem is kind of the way progress works.
Starsucks
He's probably either:
a) getting sued and his lawyers have advised him not to release too many details
b) worried about getting sued and his lawyers have advised him not to release too many details
Please lets get this straight - there is nothing immoral about reverse engineering, particularly in the interests of interoperability as seems to be the case here.
Its sad to see people put celebrity before principal, if this were Microsoft making these arguments against Samba, rather than Linus' friend making them against this Tridge guy, there would be no question as to which side most slashdotters would come down on.
The principal doesn't change just because the people in question claim to be friends of free software.
Better yet, since Larry is since against reverse engineering of his work, I hope he only uses IBM PC's, as all others stem from the original reverse engineering of the IBM BIOS.
Remember kids, it's all fun and games until someone commits wholesale galactic genocide.
Wow, I had better call my lawyer next time I decide to surf the web!
What exactly do you want him to say? He's never agreed to the BitKeeper license, and he's not bound by it. How could his defense possibly be any stronger?
What is this, some kind of astroturfing effort by McVoy to try to make us think that "everyone" feels like Tridge's defense is weak? What, exactly, is deficient in his statement?
Secession is the right of all sentient beings.
So nice of you to copy this comment from an earlier story, verbatim, without crediting the original author.
Auto-reply to ACs: "Truly, you have a dizzying intellect."
I don't think many of NewsForge's readers are going to be anti-reverse engineering. Like Sanity says, McVoy appears to want patent-level protection of his work. He doesn't have patent-level protection of his work, whether that's because he doesn't hold patents or because Tridge lives somewhere safe.
I don't think McVoy is exactly a villain here either. He just needs to quit acting like he got taken advantage of. He was doing a service and now it's not worth it to him so he's stopped. Larry McVoy, quit your bitching for your business' sake. However well founded you think it is, it only makes you sound like an asshole.
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
Or he finds the idea of getting involved in a "he said, she said" public mud flinging fest to be personally distasteful. It may be hard to believe here on Slashdot, but there really are people who feel that way.
He made the relevant points, that he did not use Bitkeeper at all in developing his tool and was never subject to the Bitkeeper license.
KFG
There's nothing wrong with Tridge writing a program that can read Bitkeeper'd files any more than there is Open Office writing programs that can read Microsoft Word files. Interoperability is good. Linus is being silly if he's blaming Tridge for anything here.
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.
Bitkeeper traces it's roots to Sun's Teamware, which was not written by Larry McVoy, to Sun's NSE-lite which was partially written by McVoy, to Sun's NSE which McVoy had absolutely nothing to do with except being an unhappy customer, to Eric Scmidt's PhD dissertation which Larry had nothing to do with, to Apollo's DSEE which Larry had nothing to do with, to SCCS which Larry had nothing to do with. Bitkeeper is largely an amalgamation of 3 previously existing ideas, the Teamware/NSE distributed development model, changesets, and the CVS pserver. It's a little hypocritical for Larry to complain about other people riding on his coat tails when Bitkeeper is, like most successful products, a really good implementation of a bunch of ideas that were invented by a lot of other people over a lot of time.
Not to mention samba sharing files and printers, or email clients interoperating with exchange, or Linux having the ability to read FAT32 and NTFS partitions.
I think "Tridge" is being scapegoated because Larry McVoy is Linus' buddy, so he doesn't want to lay the blame on him.
And let us not forget that one of Richard Stallman's most important efforts, porting of gcc to the x86, was not done in a vacume. It required a commercial version of UNIX for the x86, and the commercial version of ATT's C compiler and Assembler. All quite legally done, too.
RMS and the rest of the world moved on from that as well, and the results are the Linux world we have today.
The best way to predict the future is to create it. - Peter Drucker.
Let's look at reverse engineering for a minute. First of all, even the DMCA has a clause that protects reverse engineering for the purposes of interoperability. That's right, one of the most draconian media laws we've ever seen protects the right to figure out what something does so that you can interface to it. This is precisely what Tridge was attempting to do.
For the user, Free Software is about not being locked into a proprietary solution. BK is apparently the antithesis of this - they would very much like to lock you into BK. This is made abundantly clear when McVoy says "If we sat back and did nothing about Tridge then we are implicitly condoning reverse engineering."
For me, that tells me everything I need to know about bitmover. Reverse engineering is a necessary and even protected activity. If you want to lock people into your solution, you just don't get it.
What McVoy is saying, and what you are apparently agreeing with, is that it's reasonable that BK should be such a house of cards that it is possible to knock it over in such a way that you can't put it back again. McVoy tells us how unreliable and unmaintainable BitKeeper is in the following bit:
Why on earth is there no way to fix them by hand? Why, in fact, can I not just turn back the clock to a point where the system was not corrupted? Are they really passing information around without sanity checking? I'm sure a lot of people are saying "I can tell this asshole isn't a programmer" as they read this, but does something like this really give you a warm fuzzy feeling, knowing that if your BK DB is somehow corrupted, you're going to need a custom release of the BK software?
Was going to provide? If bitmover had seen interoperability as a goal from the beginning (the very least I will accept out of proprietary software that is part of a core business process) then it would have been provided already, Tridge would never have had reason to write tools that interfaced to BitKeeper via its internal protocols (Assuming that is what is happening, which all of this strongly implies - I don't know just what was written obviously) and this whole thing never would have happened. Instead, what happened here is that bitmover decided that they didn't want what they saw as competition, and wants to be able to lock their customers into their product, preventing them from retrieving the entirety of the data - data which belongs to them.
Tridge's efforts were entirely prudent. Functionality was needed and was not present, and he sought to add it. Bitmover was apparently not very interested in providing it; otherwise why write anything? Tridge's efforts may not have been helpful - I'll wait to see some code (or not) before I pass judgement there. However, I am inclined to say that they were helpful, in that I do not believe that the Linux development process should involve proprietary tools when there are free tools that will do the job. If Linux needs functionality not currently present in Free software, IMO the proper course to follow
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"