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Bruce Perens Tells Linus Torvalds To Cool It
Eh-Wire writes "Bruce Perens has weighed in on the controversy surrounding Andrew Trigdell's attempt to 'reverse engineer' the proprietary Bitkeeper code management software of Larry McVoy and the ensuing fallout with Linus Torvalds. Not only does he tell Linus Trovalds to 'Cool it!' he also suggests, 'Larry sees conspiracies that don't exist.' Sounds like Bruce is a bit worked up about this."
Just because Larry's paranoid doesn't mean everyone isn't out to get him.
After TheRegister made up Linus' previous quotes, I'm not sure how am I going to read quotes like "There are times when Linus Torvalds can be a real idiot, and this is one of these times".
Rock that crushes, Paper & Scissors that don't matter.
Google it - google knows whats up.
Did you mean: torvalds?
After having followed all this (and especially Linus' attacks on Tridge, which, as Bruce points out, are entirely unjustifed), I'm really wondering about one thing - just how many BitMover shares does Linus own? ^_~
quidquid latine dictum sit altum videtur.
Perens vs Torvalds vs RMS vs Gates in death match, Perens lobs a grenade. Will Torvalds respond with a clean headshot ? I can see RMS as the Axe murdering type while Gates just cheats with g0d_m0d3 .
Since when does Slashdot believe in mud-slinging? I read about Bruce Perens' comments on the Register earlier today and thought what he was saying was pretty stupid -- or at least the whole thing was stupid. How is this at all pertinent to Open Source?
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
It's like LJ drama -- Linux Journal
would i be out of line if I called out for a preemptive burying of the hatchet?
i know the community is diverse enough to handle it, but do we all want to?
it'd be horrid if something like this created a schism of any sort. seems like it's getting too heated too quickly with this kinda coverage.
not too long before geraldo gets another broken nose the way this is progressing.. haha
The only problem was our beloved /. editors not being able to RTFA.
So to in anyway use this to dismiss theregister or discredit it is simply not justified.
... the Register doesn't need any help being discredited.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
"There are times when Linus Torvalds can be a real idiot, and this is one of these times," said Perens.
I'm no kernel developer so I have no clue as to if Linus is "[being] a real idiot". However I do have a goodly bit of management experience and this kind of talk is bad no matter how you slice it.
Saying these kinds of things to the press can only hurt the whole OSS movement as it give all the MS, Sun, et all shills plenty of ammo to use. I can see press release from MS now, "And even Linus' colleagues wonder about his decision making process, going so far as to call them idiotic." Does that statement reflect what was originally intended? Of course not but this is the era of the spin and you can bet that they will use it in whatever way they can.
Really, I know what I'm doing...Ohhhh, look at the shiny buttons!
My money is on Linus. The Finnish don't take no crap. The man has been bulking up in anticipation of the bout..
Let me see if I can get this right:
Tridgell, pushing his own agenda, screws up Linus's very happy Bitkeeper deal.
Linus gets upset for this and speaks his mind. Note that Tridgell doesn't complains because he has gotten his way.
Perens calls Linus an idiot for being upset. He calls Larry names for being upset that he is upholding his side of the deal and others aren't.
Someone should tell zealots like Perens that in the real world, people compromise so everyone can be happy. Also that there is nothing wrong with with proprietary or comercial software. If it didn't exist free software would have nothing to 'libarate'.
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Damn trolls making everyone spell incorrectly.
I think Perens is really making sense here. (Not that he always doesn, but this time around he hit the nail on the head.)
Why reverse engineering the smb protocol should be considered a good thing, while reverse engineering the protocol bitkeeper uses is beyond me and though Linus has come out strong against the latter he still didn't explain how he can still consider the former to be a good thing.
And above all, I think Linus is behaving very unfair towards Tridgell, who has done nothing illegal, didn't break any contract, but just did what he has done with other things already, which were always considered to be a good thing. Why doing the very same thing considered good in other circumstances now should lead to Torvalds attacking him is again beyond me.
Honestly....
His name is spelled correctly several times in the same stub.
Apparently the editors don't even read the SUBMISSIONS anymore.
I WANT TO GET PAID TO DO ABSO-FUCKING-LUTELY NOTHING.
Saying these kinds of things to the press can only hurt the whole OSS movement as it give all the MS
What you are saying is carp. There is no way that rudementary working ethical debate can hurt the OSS movement because it's bigger than any of these players. That's why it's such an advantage over the closed model.
Each of these guys could be pictured in some lewd manner on the Smoking Gun and the whole Open Source movement would still march on!
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
Oops... maybe problem is, he is not a kernel developer, but more of a politician.
"I'll respond once just because RWT is not slash-dot." - Linus Torvalds flaming on Real World tech
There's a difference between reverse-engineering SMB and reverse-engineering Bitkeeper: noone has ever agreed to not reverse-engineer SMB just by running it. This is different from Bitkeeper. Now how does this make a difference here, where Tridgell didn't use the Bitkeeper software? He must have been listening to someone's network traffic, and either he was eavesdropping, or that other person allowed it, and this could be construed as a violation of the Bitkeeper license.
Also, McVoy has claimed that Bitkeeper saw unusual usage patterns or something like that, so maybe Tridgell even tried his software on Bitmover's servers, which to some degree would explain their anger.
Personally, I still believe that what happened is better for the Free Software movement overall. Hopefully, management people get told this story with the right spin, i.e. proprietary software means you have no rights.
1. Tridge reverse-engineers proprietary protocols. That's what he does. Ever heard of Samba?
2. As far as I can tell, Tridge wasn't intent on breaking any deal between Linus and McVoy.
3. Tridge never used BitKeeper's free client, so he did not agree to the license. He can't fail to "uphold his side of the deal", because he never made a deal.
Mod up! Forget who says what - point 1 to 3 here is right to the point of this case.
The actual statement directed at Linus was that he's got to "cool it now," and that he'd better "watch out" because he's "gonna lose control."
Furthermore, it wasn't Perens who said this. It was actually Bobby Brown. It was also at this point that Whitney Houston told Torvalds that she "believed the children were the future," and that a reversed engineered Bitkeeper would "teach them well and let them lead the way."
"The television is the retina of the mind's eye" - Videodrome
First the Penguins, then the arguments came. How many times have we seen this happen? (?)
www.whitedust.net
+50 FUNNY
Just think, the folks over at the Big red OH green SUSE engine staked their company on linux. Not looking too good right now! And the guy who controls the kernel up and gets rid of the coolest source engine control thing from what I read and now is slammed by another OSS person. The closed camp is just smiling. Go Novell, all the way down the tubes!
Oh, Christ, talk about FUD...
"Tridgell, pushing his own agenda, screws up Linus's very happy Bitkeeper deal."
Tridgell, in his free time, simply did what he is good at, reverse engineer a proprietary protocol. This is not only legal, it's also generally considered a good thing, especially in the open source community. Perens rightly points to samba as a successful and widley accepted result of reverse engineering.
"Linus gets upset for this and speaks his mind."
And he is free to do so, as are others to call his comments stupid.
"Note that Tridgell doesn't complains because he has gotten his way."
And where did you get the information, that he had an agenda in the first place and that him not saying anything is related to him getting his way and not him following sound legal advice? Oh, there isn't any such information, you just made it up to spread FUD.
"Perens calls Linus an idiot for being upset. He calls Larry names for being upset that he is upholding his side of the deal and others aren't."
Again, Tridgell didn't break any contract and didn't have any kind of deal with Tridgell, so how can you talk about Tridgell breaking a deal with Larry?
"Someone should tell zealots like Perens that in the real world, people compromise so everyone can be happy."
Wow, spreading FUD and than calling others zealots really bolsters your case. Impressive.
"Also that there is nothing wrong with with proprietary or comercial software. If it didn't exist free software would have nothing to 'libarate'."
1. Who said there was something wrong with propietary software? Perens didn't, but thanking for building this nice strawman.
2. What kind of twisted argument is that? So according to you anything bad would in fact be good, as if there was nothing bad, good could not do good. Wow.
If you start with stuff about free software zealots, then the will of those involved in the project can be ignored, since they're clearly not reasonable in their opinion, Hell, maybe they should give up on that stupid project of writing a free kernel, since there are perfectly good proprietry alternatives.
Wikileaks, no DNS
...when I read stupid political talk from people who wish to be able to influence not by providing, but by talking down the stars from heavens - well, like most stupid polticians do.
If I have to choose between a man who talks so much, and crap so often that it's far above the statistical mean, I will always take the side of the other guy, who proved his ways so many times with his deeds.
That's the story for me, you choose who's who from above.
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
My hat's off to Linus for his work and stewardship of the kernel.
That doesn't make this right, however. Linus is unequivocally wrong in creating double standards for the morality of reverse engineering, and I don't think the community is going to forget that.
I'm not vilifying Linus, I'm aying that the guy's human, not the demigod that the slashbot party portrays.
He just cannot be in such a sensitive position and remain "just an engineer".
Blearf. Blearf, I say.
While I basically agree with Bruce completely on this particular issue, there's something a bit ironic about Bruce, who has quite a reputation as a hothead himself, telling the usually unperturbable Mr. Torvalds to "cool it".
:)
:)
Ever since Larry McAvoy pulled kernel dev (and former Debian Project Leader) Ben Collins' license I've been waiting for this thing to blow up. It's been obvious that it was a matter of when, not whether. And it seems pretty obvious to me that Tridge merely provided the excuse Larry has been looking for.
Linus is a smart guy, and I'm sure he'll get over his little snit before long. But in the meantime, my god, being told to cool it by Bruce Perens is like having RMS tell you not to worry so much about whether the software is really free or not!
(Not to dis Bruce, who I really like. And, as a person of Irish descent, I understand the temper thing. But still....wow!
How 'bout bleating blowhard?
I used to like Linuse's "just for fun" and "I'm an engineer" attitude. Now I see what lack of ethics and moral code can lead to in ANY field. I say SHAME ON YOU LINUS.
US-UK-Israel: The real Axis of Evil
Wow, same trick works for "trigdell". Google is amazing. Of course, since I just misspelled McVoy in another post, I guess I shouldn't be casting stones. :)
I always wondered if it was a good idea to have one person be the end all for the kernel. Not to start a flame war here, but FreeBSD seems to take a more community approach in decision-making. The single leader format gives linux a single point of failure. With Linux, Linus is the one guy in charge. If he goes nuts, people don't really have much say (except to fork.)
unlike SMB everyone uses it and the fact is majority of the computers are running on Windows but BitKeeper is not the same case
Okay first things first, everyone should pull their heads in. Linus should give a detailed explanation of how he thinks that reverse engineering is a "Bad Thing", Tridge should break his cone of silence and let the community in on what exactly he was doing, and Larry should get used to the fact that people in the "Open" Source Community are going to want to have a SCM that meets their requirements, both in terms of technical abilities and licensing issues.
I think this is what Bruce was trying to say.
If any of the above mentioned do happen to read this (seriously doubtful I know) this does not imply disrespect for your previous work, just that my seven year old acts like this when he gets pissed off too.
Like they said. Over 200 developers are active in kernel development at any time, thousands and thousands of people have contributed code.
I know it's passe' to have convictions and ideals nowadays were only practicality and money matters, but some people do beleive in something.
Many of the developers in the Linux kernel project have devoted their lives to the prospect that software should be Free. Many have based their lives and livelyhoods around it, and have made lots of money off of it.
And here comes Linus telling them that they may not use the programming software of their choice, and in addition to that they have to use crippleware that has other restrictions such as you can't try to understand how it works.
So Linus hands black box software out to Free Software developers, many with deep convictions, and says: "I am basing Linux development around this. You can use it, but don't look otherwise it will be taken away from us."
WTF was he thinking?!!
How the hell is he going to FORCE all the developers to abide by a agreement that they not only dissagree with, but in some cases consider the entire concept of black box software as immoral!
Bitkeeper may have been a good technical choice, but a extremely bad when it comes to reality.
Linus can't tell programmers what they can and cannot do any more then you or I can. Most people listenned to him becuase they gave him benifit of the doubt, but it was something that was going to end badly and it did.
And now Linus is blaming another person for his own personal fuck-up and Perens is calling him out on it.
This shit happens. It's happenned before with Linux, were Linus made very poor decision on something (SMP support for instance) and people had to force his hand.
This was doomed from the start. Everybody knew it. RMS knew it. The majority of the kernel developers knew it. Perens knew it. I knew it. Linus was just being stubborn.
He made a mistake, it's ok to make mistakes. But it's not ok to get abusive over it.
And don't worry. Linux will move on.
I don't recall hearing about Microsoft donating free licenses to Linux or Samba developers.
When you continously give something of value to a group of people, and they 'condone' a member of their group to do something that jeopardizes your livelyhood (how you pay your rent and provide for your family) then it is understandable that you might want to stop giving to that group--especially when the gift was costing you around $500,000/year. Seriously, think about this scenario without associating it with open source, etc. You bet your ass you'd stop giving to that group!
The ideal solution would've been for the 'troublemaker' to leave the group, so that the gift-giver would have no grounds to stop giving to the entire group. But nooo....that was too simple for them to consider.
Linus did the right thing because all the open source SCM solutions sucked for the past few years. There are some really cool open source solutions like SVK and monotone, but they probably could've used another couple years to become robust enough for a large, complex project like the Linux kernel.
Linux clearly benefitted from Bitkeeper. And Bitkeeper probably benefitted from all the publicity.
People should select SCM software based on technical merits and user productivity rather than religious views on licensing. The idiocy and fanaticism of both corporate monkeys and GPL fanatics never cease to amaze me. Linus avoids these two opposite extreams and did what was best for the Linux kernel--unfortunately, the fanatics surrounding Linus put an end to a good thing.
BTW, I'm a very satisfied Subversion 1.1.4 (Debian server) and TortoiseSVN (Windows client) user so I've nothing against open source SCM products for my needs. I just know that for the Linux kernel, there really isn't anything as appropriate as Bitkeeper.
And I pray that ClearCase doesn't become the SCM for Linux (in case IBM offers a very generous license). Not because it is closed source, but because I didn't like my experiences with it.
Sure, this may be the same thing that happened with Samba but linus never made any claims about the legality. Something which may be technically and legally similar is not necessarily just as good a strategic idea.
In the case of microsoft we had a widely deployed piece of software that the open source community needed to interact with for compatibility reasons. Nothing of the kind is true with BitKeeper. In the case of BitKeeper the open source community could have simply built their own incompatible protocol and not have to worry about being shut out of the market by a BitMover monopoly. On the other hand in the case of microsoft the open source community couldn't simply build a better protocol than Samab but really needed to be compatible.
Secondly, while it's possible I very much doubt that the BitKeeper protocol was being reverse engineered from the expensive pro version. Most likely it being reverse enginered from the free versions (or at least comped versions). Unlike microsoft which needs to keep Samba out there in every windows box BitMover was just allowing this free usage as a donation/PR move and could easily revoke it without comprimising their buisness model.
In short by trying to reverse engineer this protocol it seems that Andrew? gave the impression that the 'price' of donating expensive software to open source projects is to have your market advantages reverse engineered and probably implemented in free projects. So while sure he has just as much right to reverse engineer in samba the first instance is an important blow against a monopoly trying to use propietary protocols to unfairly strangle competition. In this case there was no similar monopolistic pressure (there isn't a strong installed base of BK users who we need to be compatible with) and made it look like there was a steep price for trying to help the open source community.
Regardless of what you think of the deciscion to use BK or the need to reverse engineer this project having someone paid by the SAME organization which is the beneficiary of the free software (or at least appears to be in the media) is surely a bad move politically. It certainly would give me pause if I was a manager at a big corporation thinking of donating some helpful development tools to some open source project.
If you liked this thought maybe you would find my blog nice too:
So, do we get to see Microsoft products using Bitkeeper? I don't get the message here. If Larry goes ahead with this "no competing products" thing (as if he has no idea about the opensource community), extinction would probably be inevitable as has started happening to someone who owned almost every PC.
Sorry Larry, thought you had it all worked out. This seems to have nosedived. The opensource community made a better OS platform "GNU/Linux" against one that was "freely" available in India (when piracy couldn't be checked.) Are we trying to say we can't create a "better than bitkeeper" versioning system? We made so much progress with just CVS.
No Greater Friend, No Greater Enemy! (Lucius Cornelius Sulla)
While I agree, there is no "moral" argument to be made here, in fact the situations are different from the perspective of OSS. A more apt analogy could be made to Qt and Trolltech than to Samba.
Bitkeeper exists almost solely to support Linux development. In exchange, Mr. McVoy sells a proprietary version for commercial use in order to support the one he gives away for free for OSS. Having Bitkeeper helps Linux, at the cost of charging for other uses.
Samba, of course, is free to no one. Reverse engineering it helps OSS. It also happens to help everyone else. You could say the situations are the same, but the fact is that Samba won't go away if it's reverse engineered. Bitkeeper very well could. In fact, reverse engineering Samba opened up new opportunities for Linux and OSS. It's doubtful doing the same for Bitkeeper would have the same effect.
If Mr. Tridgell has a personal stake in having a free version of Bitkeeper for commercial use, that's one thing. He should go ahead and reverse it. If, on the other hand, he feels he's helping OSS by reverse engineering Bitkeeper, he's wrong. If I were Larry, I'd do the exact same thing.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
he made a poor choice (against peer advice) to use a non-open method of doing a particular thing, which has backfired on him in exactly the way he was warned. Which means he's now got to do some bloody work!
He doesn't have a good argument to defend his original decision, so rather than admit he was wrong and just get on with fixing his mistake he's making some prima donna noise against Andrew Tridgell. I probably would do the same in similar circumstances, damn it!
I'm sure he will get over it. It would be nice if he did indeed "cool it" in the mean time.
I have no mod points, but well said!
Extra points for life-insights at the end. A baby sees only innocense and love, because it is that. Somehow, we became adult, full of impressions and memories. If we let go of that, we become like children again, only with wisdom this time. Follow the wisdom, not what people say, what you read in books, social rules or anything. All that's in the wisdom anyways.
Having a sig like that brings out the best of Slashdot. They can dish it out, but they can't take it.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
How was it costing them that much? Such figures are just like the IRAA's 'cost of piracy' figures - pure Bull.
Look at the 'cost'..
- is it costing BK the value of the licenses?
.. No. That's revenue that they could have gained if the kernel developers chose to buy it independantly
- is it the cost of developing bug-fixes?
.. don't make me laugh - they have to do that anyways.
- Is is the cost of implementing features necessary for a huge distributed development team?
.. considering that this is precisely what BK was designed for, a large amount of such improvements would be required or requested by their paying customers anyways.
- Bandwidth and server costs?
.. yes, they are costs that BK would have to bear, but I doubt very much that it comes to anywhere near the half a mil a year quoted.
Let's look at what BK gained from the deal- They got massive and public prof that the system did what it was supposed to and worked well at this scale - how many other projects (OS or proprietary) as large would use it and allow BK to say they were using it?
- Massive, massive, huge unspeakable amounts of good publicity - it went from a fairly niche product to something that every linux hacker has discussed overnight!
- I would imagine a large number of big customers would have moved to BK purely for those two points alone.
That makes no sense at all.Tridge should leave what group, exactly?
The group of BK users - that he wasn't a part of anyway? - or the OSS group? "sorry mate, that guy over there doesn't like the look of you, so you will have to give up your hobby. Stop coding now and stop giving stuff away"
You do realise thatthe entire foundation, the whole point, the differentiator of open source software is licensing. The license issue is a hugely important issue, otherwise Linux would not have made it much further past Linus' initial realease. Those people with the skill enough and cared enough to want software with user-friendly licenses picked it up and helped along to bring things where they are - if you don't get the licensing point, you simply do not get open source software.
So what you are saying is that no one can disagree with Linus? That a person volunteering his time on a project cannot decide to work on something else at the same time?
Yup that sounds like Russia circa 1940, which by the way would be a very offensive thing to accuse Linus of considering his home country was desperately trying to fight off the Russians at that time.
Until we hear all sides of the story, not just Larrys and Linus' we should refrain from leaping in with both feet, we may just find that they end up in our mouths.
The Register has been completely biased about the matter so I wouldn't take their word on anything. Linus is pissed off at Tridge because he messed up the deal with McVoy and wasn't even trying to produce anything functional to replace BK. "He just wanted to see what the protocols and data was, without actually producing any replacement for the (inevitable) problems he caused and knew about."
Everybody seems to forget that McVoy contributed more than $500 000 worth of software to the osdl. Without the contribution, Tridge would have never been able to even try to reverse engineer the program.
Linus lost the use of the best SCM there is. Why shouldn't he be pissed?
Proprietary isn't (always) evil!
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.
Seems to me that Linus has been up on that pedestal for so long that he's starting to suffer from vertigo.
Linus's description of kernel development as "corraling cats" still holds true. And you don't corral cats by putting a dog smack in the middle of them.
This was a bomb waiting to go off. Linus may be pissed, but reality does that to people when they don't adhere to it's laws.
Tridge didn't do anything wrong. In fact he excel's at doing things right. See the newforge interview to get an idea.
I rarely agree with Bruce's conclusions, but this is one of the times he makes total realistic sense. Plopping the smartest, most dedicated GPL developers on a proprietary system without their consent is tantamount to treason in government. Like fingernails on a chalk board, you could hear the kernel developers principles twisting as Linus declared the use of BitKeeper law.
Linus made a bad choice. Now he gets to pay for it. Cause and effect. If BitKeeper was under an open cource license, then it wouldn't be subject to the whim's of one man's bowel movement on a certain day. But it is, and Linus should have had the foresight to see that.
He isn't just an engineer when he is steering the ship. He is the captain. He has the responsibility to look ahead of the curve, and to not get romanced by the easy way out when he's in charge. But he didn't. He fucked up. Now the role of a leader is to admit the mistake and ask for alternatives. Leave Tridge out of this. He did his job. I hope Linus does his.
Obviously many people care, particularly the people who got screwed over when BK reneged. Linux is bigger than Linus, even though it may not be bigger than Linus's ego.
It appears to be a "gift" with chains attached to it, and is not much different from other vendors lock-in attempts. Many refused the "gift", and they are, of course, not obliged to respect it's condition nor live by them.
"Kernel in the City"
Does Linus dual boot his PB? Will Perens choose to stop frequenting the Pickled Penguin after his fall out with Larry?
Real developers, real lives; this compelling new series promises to 'take the clothes off' Kernel Development.
Torvalds used the best tool at the time. Now he has to change, not because there is a suitable alternative ready but because of Tridge's work.
Having to change a crucial dev tool because of someone elses action is going to provoke some response. Especially since the outcome seems fairly predictable giving the circumstances and "Idiot" is pretty mild.
What has been gained by reverse engineering? Does it outweigh the loss of time and momentum? The sums here are totally different to the Samba situation.
Time will tell but in the end an open source solution does "feels" better.
Linus can't even pronounce his own name right.
BITCHSLAP & PWNZEDWTFBBQSTPDLTTRSTHTDNTMKSNS!!!122137
now what will linus do?
As we all know, recently some major milestones were achieved in the development of the HURD. Larry is basically one of RMS' pawns to make Linus look bad to the community so everyone will switch to the HURD in the coming years. He's basically pissed because the biggest name in the OSS community is not a fanatic like he is. He figured out that Linux is doing so well because the benevolent dictator pattern actually works quite well, so the way to destroy this is to turn Linus into a malevolent dictator.
As RMS will point out to everyone by the time everybody starts getting fed up with Linus: "Linux is just a kernel, we can get another one, in fact, one is maturing nicely right now..."
He isn't just an engineer when he is steering the ship. He is the captain.
Love, exciting and new,
Come aboard.
We're expecting you.
Love, life's sweetest reward.
Let it flow,
it floats back to you.
The Love Boat
soon will be making another run.
The Love Boat promises something for everyone.
Set a course for adventure,
Your mind on a new romance.
Love won't hurt anymore
It's an open smile on a friendly shore.
It's Looooove!
Welcome aboard - It's Looooove!
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
Eric S Raymond comes into the room bitching that he wasn't invited to the death match, whips out an AK-47, and blows all of them away, all the while muttering something about "damn socialists"
a) Someone has made a solution that is better than anything you have, and you are trying to find out what makes it tick so you can cheat and steal it.
b) Someone has made a solution that is pretty good, but which you have something just as good as, and you seek only interoperability*
It strikes me from what I've read that this whole BitKeeper fiasco is an example of the former i.e. that the open-source community do not have anything as capable as BitKeeper is, and this kind of reverse-engineering is, as Larry puts it, "riding my coat-tails", and is something I don't really like to see happen, nor would I sleep easily at night if I did. Samba, on the other hand (see extensive footnote below!) is different - I gather that very capable networking systems have already been created (although I could well be wrong about this - I know very little about networking) and so the open-source community has already proven that it has the brainpower required to produce something "as good as" Samba, and so is not cheating. If this is true, then I would not lose a wink of sleep from reverse-engineering Samba.
Another example I guess would be in video codecs - I see nothing wrong with reverse-engineering WMV so that it could be played in mplayer, as the open-source community already has xvid, which is at least almost as good as WMV (perhaps even better; I do not know).
* There is no conflict between "being as good as" and "not being interoperable with" i.g. "not being able to do the same thing as, in the same way". As an example, say I created a networking protocol that enabled one to share files, printers etc easily and transparently - i.e. does everything that Samba can do. However, I know nothing about the way that Samba works, so although on a network of computers running only clients and servers for my protocol, everything works just as well as it would in an all-Samba environment, put any of my servers and clients in a Samba environment and they will not work - my protocol, from the point of view of observed function, is just as good and capable as Samba, it's just they speak different languages.
"Bitkeeper is suitable for any project THE AUTHOR OF THE PROJECT
CHOOSES. Linus may not have authored most of the code in Linux anymore
but at the end of the day it's his trademark and his baby, and he can
do what the hell he likes."
Yes, that's quite true.
And all of the other Linux contributors can decide to work on forks that don't require the use of BitKeeper, and furthermore not give two cents if their patches get incorporated into the "vanilla" kernel. Linus has no god-given right of leadership, and there's no reason everybody should continue to trust him if he doesn't treat them properly.
And, by the way, writing code is not the only good thing you can do for free software.
And if somebody wants to come along and tell me this isn't about free software, they can please tell themselves to piss off. Of COURSE it is! Why else is Linux under the bloody GPL?
But does Microsoft
1)has a license stating that windows users can't develop other competing products ?
2)refuse to license windows to say Novel or IBM who develops competing products ?
The answer is No !
Bitkeeper won't even sell you a license if you work on a competing product.If that is not being paranoid and unreasonable i don't know what is.
TechSutra
"The real mistake was to accept the 'free' BitKeeper licence with its poison pill"
Had the 'free-licence' been (a) irrevokable, and (b) had a sensible (BK) source escrow term, then and only then would the cost-benefit to Bitmover and the community made _balanced_ sense.
But that is water under the bridge, what is really interesting is the fallout, GIT.
GIT is the Linus' replacement patch-manager, and will, I predict revolutionise thinking about SCM tools. Linus has come up with an original and revolutionary approach, (less than 6 man-weeks work, under 150k code) which lays the foundations for a really effective OpenSource SCM, and, in the process run a pithy seminar class in what was the matter with traditional SCMs.
This may turn out to be one of the most useful things to have happened in a long time.
You don't need to be a software developer of any kind to understand that it's a bad thing when Linus Torvalds told Andrew Tridgell to stop developing his free software network-compatible replacement for BitKeeper. If McVoy's retelling is accurate, I find it very disturbing and so should everyone else in the free software community. This is a very big sign that Torvalds is not the free software "posterboy" some take him to be. We don't tell one another what programs to write or not write without paying them, and we certainly don't impede another's desire to promote a free software alternative to a proprietary program. Impeding free software is harmful to the community.
This is remarkably one-sided of Torvalds as well. I'm sure Microsoft doesn't appreciate Samba servers being used instead of Microsoft Windows servers, yet the reason Samba is so good at what it does (and can replace some Microsoft SMB servers) is because Tridgell and the other Samba developers did the reverse-engineering work to figure out how the SMB protocols work in practice. I don't recall reading about Torvalds defending proprietary software being distributed by Microsoft by telling Tridgell to stop his Samba work; but BitMover's proprietary software has received that kind of attention from Torvalds. Torvalds is serving as a buttress for BitMover here.
As for Torvalds sometimes being a "real idiot", I can attest to that although I would never have called him names. I can think of instances where Torvalds inadvertantly embarassed himself when his opinion was sought on political matters. In such instances it is clear to all but the most ardent Torvalds fans that his reach exceeds his grasp. If I recall correctly, a recent Newsforge.com interview asked him what he thought of the upcoming GNU GPL v3 (possibly years before it comes out). This struck me as unwise since he does not closely examine copyright law or its ethical import for society (two of the things one needs to have down pat to offer critique worth considering regarding the GPL). For this advice I would have instead asked Eben Moglen or RMS, both authorities on the issues surrounding the GPL. By contrast, asking Torvalds about Linux kernel programming would be perfectly appropriate. I'd never think to go to Moglen or RMS for this information.
You shouldn't fear "spin". You need to trust that people will examine what happened and be reasonable, discuss the situation, and find better arguments. Microsoft will distort history regardless of what we do. They've proven this with their college campus tours and interviews when they declare that free software is a "cancer" or will eat your "intellectual property" like Pac-Man. Brad Kuhn (former executive director of the FSF) said at a talk in Urbana, IL that the annual budget for the FSF is what Microsoft makes in 30 seconds, yet Microsoft has said that the FSF is a threat to software development worldwide. When we see something unethical going on, we need to speak up about it, no matter who is at fault. The cure for bad speech is more speech.
Digital Citizen
Hence, making the poster boy of Open Source appear to be a strong supporter of intellectual property rights.
Linus is a far more practical proponent than most give him credit for.
- ss1720
And that's exactly what Tridgell was doing. The register says he was only doing the client, but that's naive (or pretends to be). Many people would love Trigell make a competing alternative - and good on him! But McVoy has said "that's fine, but I'm not going to provide free licenses to a company that is gpoing to scuttle the uniqueness of my hard work!".
I personally think that geeks everywhere should celebrate anyone who comes up with a cool new better way to do things. That's McVoy. Yeah, it's nicer if you do it all for free, but you deserve some reward for all that hard work and risk and creativity!!!! So there it is.
Someone should tell zealots like Perens that in the real world, people compromise so everyone can be happy. Also that there is nothing wrong with with proprietary or comercial software. If it didn't exist free software would have nothing to 'libarate'.
Perhaps you're not aware of Mr. Perens' ideals, and his Sincere Choice project?
zWhat would an EWOULDBLOCK block, if an EWOULDBLOCK could block would? -- me
Read the Real World Tech thread to get a better idea of where Linus is coming from. Personally I find his stance very strange indeed. I think most of us do, which is why this is such a big story.
...in a post on another site. But his reasoning clearly held an obvious double-standard that I simply can't swallow. My only explanation for Linus' inability to see what's right in front of his face is that he's personally invested in the issue due to his friendship with the maker of BitKeeper. Anything else just doesn't explain how the normally rational and reasonable Torvalds can do a one-eighty on this particular issue and, quite frankly, be an complete dick about in the process (his post, if you haven't read it, was more like a typical slashdot flamefest response than what you'd expect from Linus).
This is one instance where Linus isn't thinking clearly. I'll cut him some slack since in the past he's been more clear-headed than all of Slashdot put together, but even so it means I'll be reviewing what he says and does more carefully in the future - at least until I'm convinced he's gotten over this momentary bout of insanity.
One thing I do agree with, and always will: 'open source' and 'free software' are not one and the same, nor is there any moral issue involved in using open/free or proprietary software. Both models are perfectly valid and the people who turn the whole mess into a good/evil holy war are fucking idiots of the first order. On that he is, and always has been, right on target.
Max
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?
If there are any legal problems with Tridgell's work, they'll sort it out one way or another, but it's no use shouting all over the press what one should do and what not.
"I love my job, but I hate talking to people like you" (Freddie Mercury)
Wow, for once the Slashdot groupthink isn't pro-Linus. But I am. I'll explain why. First, you need to read the original thread to get a feel for what Linus is saying. At least read the first 15 posts there.
After you've read it, you'll come away with a few realizations:
Just think: if you were a bottleneck, if data and people were coming at you at a very fast pace all the time, and if there was tremendous pressure on you to build a platform that would rival Microsoft, one coping mechanism is to find tools that increase productivity. A lot. (Other good coping mechanisms include heavy drinking and vanishing without a trace.)
Now Linus, who has no ready alternative is staring down a barrel of loaded source code, knowing it's going to fire off in his face real soon now. And someone else has yanked his defense right out from under him. He has a real problem now. He's pissed. I can put myself in his shoes, I can understand his frustration. Basically, it's this: "Well great. WTF do I do now? Oh shit, stuff is backing up already. Thanks! That's fucking great!"
Is Torvalds wrong to blame Trigdell for reverse engineering? Yes. Is Torvalds wrong to feel horribly, disastrously inconvenienced by this? No, he has every right. Forget the technical arguments for a day or a week. This is a human issue right now. People were inconsiderate of each other, and now they're walking around with bloddy noses. Give them time to assess the situation. If Torvalds doesn't soften his position in a short while, fork, screw him, whatever. But give him some time for the fight or flight instinct to be peter out before you all write him off.
My Greasemonkey scripts for Digg &
Sorry, but that's all there is to it. He picked a proprietary tool with a lousy license. In addition, the tool was produced by someone who seemed pretty clearly unstable and hostile to open source. Now that the chickens have come how to roost, he is trying to blame other people for the unpleasant task of having to switch version control systems.
I'm glad Linus does the work he does, but I don't particularly trust him to make good long-term judgements. Tanenbaum was right on the technical side, and all the people who warned about the version control system issue were right on the license front.
Let's make sure there are some good alternatives to the Linux kernel around (the main thing that Linus actually contributes to Linux) because one of these days, he is going to screw up in a way that can't be fixed anymore.
COME ON, WHERE ARE all the Bruce perens,
.Bruce Perens (150539)
Bruce Perens
Bruce Perens. (123221)
Bruce.Perens (124707)
BrucePerens (149861)
! Bruce Perens (150447)
Bruce@Perens (150787)
_Bruce Perens (150807)
Brews Perens (151065)
Brooce Perens (151069)
not Bruce Perens (152525)
Bruce Perens (181232)
Bruuce Perens (202923)
Bruce Perens.nbsp (204587)
Fake Bruce Perens (228312)
Burce Perens (229006)
8ruce Perens (239350)
Bruth Perens (746262)
Bruce Perens (3872) (806888)
We want a perens trolling mathch!!!!!!!!!
This Message and all replies are the Property of the Fox network. © 2002
'Nuff said.
It's not the end of the world, it's like a small lover's quarrel. Even though Microsoft would like you to believe otherwise.
Linux is just a kernel and we can get another one. Debian GNU/kFreeBSD for example.
No one has bothered to put together a BSD/linux yet. It might be because BSD sucks, I don't know; I don't know anything about BSD. But it can be done if anyone was interested.
The Hurd is not maturing nicely. All it can do at the moment is print out an exclamation mark with the banner program. With the decision to use a different microkernel they set development back by years. For the curious there is a Hurd live cd that does very little.
Screw the moral arguments - using this stuff in the first place was a *stupid* idea purely from a risk-mitigation viewpoint.
Bad news, folks. The specialist in herding cats
...
c ti on=detail&PostNum=3322&Thread=2&entryID=49312&room ID=11
has peaked and may well be in need of counselling:
> He just wanted to see what the protocols and data was,
> without actually producing any replacement for the
> (inevitable) problems he caused and knew about.
>
> He didn't create something new and impressive. He just tore
> down something new (and impressive) because he could, and
> rather than helping others, he screwed people over. And you
> expect me to _respect_ that kind of behaviour?
http://www.realworldtech.com/forums/index.cfm?a
.
Linus is referring here to Andrew Tridgell and the
Bitkeeper saga. The essentials:
(1) Tridge did not use Bitkeeper at work. Nor did
he use it at home. Nor did he have any kind of
Bitkeeper licence. Nor did he disassemble any
Bitkeeper binaries.
(2) All Tridge did was to send systematic queries
over the Internet to the Bitkeeper server.
Analysing its responses, he was able to write
an application to read and export from the
Bitkeeper server.
(3) That technique is called protocol scanning and
has already been successfuly used for Samba.
It is perfectly legal otherwise Microsoft's
lawyers would have been hounding Tridge a long
time ago.
So what was Tridge's crime? He declined requests by Linus Torvalds and Larry McVoy to stop scanning
Bitkeeper. For that, he is now on the receiving end of insults and innuendo.
Too bad really, both for him and for Linus. Indeed, this story is not any longer about a versioning system for the kernel. It is about Linux after Linus.
Considering Linus was using BK to maintain Linux, on Linux, BM have to be using Linux right? for support and development. So when they gave away there "free license", they are actually supporting their own business, aren't they? So when they talk about cost, do they take in consideration that don't have to pay any lincenses for Linux, and that if there was no Linux in the first place, or a lesser quality Linux, it would affect their very own business????
Geesh Linus ... what the heck does he think he's doing, you can't just simply defame someone because of their work! Maybe the kernel team should just tell Linus to shove it, go play with something shiny and let the people get on with their own thing. BitPooper has perhaps made Linus' dictatorship easier but many a kernel guru have bemoaned it's existence. Maybe it's time for Linus to BACK OFF...
BK is distributed. And Tridge's tool is 'accessing the server'.
Wait a moment. Which server??? Distributed means no central server...
Does the distributed nature of BK not imply that every environment is at the same time server and client?
This would mean that to work with the tool you need to connect it the installation of those developers that you which to cooperate with?! An this would drag them automatically into the conflict between BM and Tridge.
To which Linus replies: (AIQICYDWTFTL)
This would mean that to work with the tool you need to connect it the installation of those developers that you which to cooperate with?!
Yes. Well. Only one of them.
But yes, it does mean that for at least that one developer, your point of:
And this would drag them automatically into the conflict between BM and Tridge.
Exactly.
So Tridge is entirely correct in saying that he didn't violate any licenses, since he never agreed to a BK license in the first place. But for the tool to be useful, somebody ends up having to be the fall guy.
I'm just gonna make my own, dammit.
Linux clearly benefitted from Bitkeeper. And Bitkeeper probably [emphasis added] benefitted from all the publicity.
Did you read what you just wrote? This might help explain your bias.
I can see the Linus vs Bruce bar brawl now - Pee Wee Herman and Mr Bean the rematch
Nothing costs nothing
...unlike some of the other OSS profiles.
Linux was a solution to a technical problem that Linus had, not a moral code or way of life. Linus has always seemed to be very pragmatic, he has a softspot for anything that works well.
Lately, this has seemed to put him on a collision course with the growing number of OSS-or-bust fanatics who puts politics before function. Something like this bitkeeper debacle was bound to happen sooner or later.
"Cool it"?
Do people still talk that way? It made me think of adult metrosexual dancers trying to play street punks in West Side Story:
Don't get hot
'Cause man you got
Some high times ahead
Take it slow
And Daddy-o
You can live it up and die in bed
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
One thing I've always wondered about with /. and The Register. /. seems to be pretty anti-patent and anti-copyright community (mostly). However, there are always lots of articles from The Register posted here.
Have you ever noticed at the end of every article on The Register they have "®"? What does this mean?
When is it proper to use the federal registration symbol (the letter R enclosed within a circle -- ® -- with the mark.
The federal registration symbol may be used once the mark is actually registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. Even though an application is pending, the registration symbol may not be used before the mark has actually become registered. The federal registration symbol should only be used on goods or services that are the subject of the federal trademark registration. [Note: Several foreign countries use the letter R enclosed within a circle to indicate that a mark is registered in that country. Use of the symbol by the holder of a foreign registration may be proper.]
Is trademark law all that different in the UK where you can mark every article as trademarked as soon as you write it? No need for registration (hense the term registered trademark) before using it?
Or am I just being daft? Really I don't understand this use so if anyone does understand why this is done I'd be interested.
"reality has a well-known liberal bias" - Steven Colbert
really brilliant people are just as capable of really stupid behavior as anyone. If there's any difference, it's that it's on a more grandiose scale.
If you point out that they're making asses of themselves they'll argue you into half agreeing with them. They'll have rationalized their behavior to a fare-thee-well. Even if you identify the fatal flaw in their theory, they'll ignore you -- they're brilliant after all and they're used to being right when everyone around them is telling them they're wrong.
Don't get me wrong -- I love working with super-smart, creative people. But when they get that glint of mania in their eyes, you just have to back off and let experience teach them a lesson. Their being wrong in this instance doesn't invalidat their briliance, it just makes them human.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
This whole subject comes from The Register, which is known to say things that are, shall we say, highly interpretive.
I'm take the whole thing with a large landfill of salt.
I don't see any references to other sites in the article. Is there some place where I can read what Bruce Perens has really written?
I read the 'Torvalds knifes Tridgell' article and after that the original posting made by Torvalds.
It gave me a different picture of the whole issue.
The Register article "Torvalds knifes Tridgell" points to a posting in the forum at Real Word Technologies. My question is: is it sure, that this really was Linus Torvalds? I mean, in this discussion later on Bill Gates, Scott McNealy, Sam Palmisano and Darl McBride post some comments.
Using some fake name in a discussion forum is the easyest thing. So, where do we know, that the posting, where Tridgell is attacked, was really written by Torvalds?
The way Linus sounds these days reminds me of Lauris Kaplinski, creator of Sodipodi, in the era just before the Inkscape fork. Sad, really.
The answer to #1 is actually "yes"
IIRC, the educational license has a clause like that for devstudio.
BSD has a long history of being a system full system, unlike Linux (kernel) or GNU (a set of tools with the aim of one day becoming a full clone of the base UNIX System). The BSD kernels are developed and maintained by the same people as the base userlands of the respective BSD systems, so there's never been a tendency to view the two as separate things (like Linux and GNU).
Linus is worked up about something and it may be something we've not heard yet, especially with Andrew's silence. Do we know there wasn't a conversation that this work by Andrew would screw over Linus's use of a tool that makes work very efficient for him? And if Andrew persisted, especially if there were other ways to accomplish the same thing, I'd be upset too.
I'm fortunate enough to have a boss that allows me to use the best tool for the job. I enjoy being allowed to choose the best tool, for me to get the task at hand done. Is sad that Linus isn't allowed the same without taking a beating especially when the end product he is part of is so useful to all of us. So much for choice and freedom. Oh there is, it's just not the typical Linux/Open Source zealot view of choice and freedom and if that view isn't accepted then you are evil.
I'll stand in the minority and say that I feel sad for Linus losing a tool that was so helpful in creating a tool I find so useful. Yeah, he had some outlandish comments but how many of us are perfectly logical when we lash out?
I for one cannot wait to hear the whole story before judging.
Bryan Cantrill's post on the fundamental right of reverse engineering.
Linus is right in what he said. He may look like an idiot right now, but he isn't. Please read his posts (cited below), and don't believe hearsay.
He said this episode is damaging to the Linux kernel *project*, because he took advantage of, and depended on, BK's *functionality*, not BK per se. He said there isn't any other app (open or closed) that offers that functionality, and that he would rather write a new one himself.
[...] It's unquestionably true that BitKeeper has advanced the state of SCM technology. Anybody who argues against that just doesn't know what the hell he is talking about. But I'd have loved even an "almost-as-good" open source SCM, because that would obviously just be a good idea.
[...]
Now, I'm dealing with the fall-out, and I'll write my own kernel source tracking tool because I can't use the best any more. That's ok - I deal with my own problems, thank you very much. But what I find sad is how some people are so _gleeful_ about a commercial program becoming less useful, only because it was commerical.
If BK was a crappy tool, I'd at least understand the glee. But in this case it was the commercial people who did the impressive technology and pushed technology forward. And I'm just honest enough to be able to say that.
http://www.realworldtech.com/forums/index.cfm?acti on=detail&PostNum=3322&Thread=2&entryID=49312&room ID=11
So: true support for totally distributed development (replication doesn't count), performance, and trust. Nothing else matters. And BK does those better than anything else I've seen. ;)
(Well, at least I hope those are the only three things that matter. The quick-hack framework I'm putting together bases its entire design on just those three things, and maybe I'll find out that I'm wrong, and that there are three other things that I just took for granted
http://www.realworldtech.com/forums/index.cfm?acti on=detail&PostNum=3322&Thread=5&entryID=49321&room ID=11
He said he doesn't believe in the open-or-nothing 'solution'.
So I think open source tends to become technically better over time (but it does take time), but I don't think it's a moral imperative. I do open source because it's fun, and because I think it makes sense in the long run.
For some reason that is hard for a lot of free software people to accept. Too many people see things as a war of "free software" against "proprietary evil". This is, btw, the real difference between the "open source" crowd and the "free software" crowd, as far as I'm concerned.
http://www.realworldtech.com/forums/index.cfm?acti on=detail&PostNum=3322&Thread=2&entryID=49312&room ID=11
He did NOT say Tridgell didn't have a right to do what he did. He said Tridgell's goal was not to develop an alternative to BK right now (and therefore his current work wasn't a solution to his dependence 'problem'), and now the *project* is going to suffer.
But that's not what Tridge did. He didn't write a "better SCM than BK". He didn't even try - it wasn't his goal. He just wanted to see what the protocols and data was, without actually producing any replacement for the (inevitable) problems he caused and knew about.
He didn't create something new and impressive. He just tore down something new (and impressive) because he could, and rather than helping others, he screwed people over. And you expect me to _respect_ that kind of behaviour?
morons
Which is exactly why opensource will remain a niche market to nowhere, because it can't be a market.
Nobody cares about licensing. You four basement dwelling fuckos can keep bitching about moaning about "freedom" while IBM, Sun, Apple, et al get to actually make money violating those principals.
No, Perens should cool it. If he don't like Linus' attitude FUCK HIM. Go work for the GNU/HURD project and all that that stands for. WTF?
I say we take a copy of the BSD Kernel and GPL-it, you think of a name for it BSGPL or something cute like that
Then more people will start to contribute to it who care about their work staying free and maybe we can have a BSD kernel that has the size of community as a GPL project.
The BSD license lets us do that you know...its soo much more free than GPL yadda.
Hell, I say take a whole copy of the latest FreeBSD distro and we make it GPL and we all start working on it from now on.
Who's with me!! Lets get bsgpl.sourceforge.net going soon!
-- Given enough time and money, Microsoft will eventualy invent UNIX.
As I said, Linus does do some stuff wrong of a time.
But Bruce is no man to criticise.
The BitKeeper license states that you cannot use BitKeeper to reverse engineer
it and therefore create derivative products. Andrew Tridgell *DID* use it because
he was prodding it to get the wire protocol. You don't have to be creating
software with it to do that.
The fact is that he was working for OSDL, which licensed the software for obvious
reasons, and the license states (and pretty much every law in every country in
the world will uphold) that OSDL are responsible for upholding the license with
respect to their employees or subcontractors.
BK definitely is suitable for Linux development at Linus' end, despite "concensus"
of a bunch of hippies. "Linus uses it and doesn't listen to anyone else on the
subject" kind of quotes piss me off - why shouldn't Linus dictate the development
model and practise of HIS project? I don't see *ANY* part of the GPL or any other
license that relinquishes project management to a free-not-beer committee rather
than the original developer or stipulates that no commercial software ever be
used to promote development of GPL software.
Linus is right in this instance. Bruce is wrong AS USUAL.
Neko
This link shows that The Register is trademarked in the UK.
;-)
"The Register" is a UK-based company, and therefore doesn't have to deal with US trademark law (for the most part). The link above is their trademark application with the UK trademark office.
According to the FAQ, the use of "TM" in the UK is acceptable without having registered the trademark with the registrar. And according to the Trade Marks Act 1994, it is illegal to use the "Registered" trade mark symbol (the R with a circle) unless it is, in fact, registered.
So The Register is officially allowed to use the "registered" symbol based on their trademarked status. And of course it makes for a great double entendre when used at the end of an article.
So no, you're not daft. But now you're probably a bit better informed.
Yeah they could. Anyone can fork the Linux kernel and produce a parallel operating system and "not care if stuff gets back to the vanilla kernel".
I'm sure there are 10s or 100s of these existing now because it's obviously such a great, workable idea with thousands of tertiary benefits besides losing Linus and his Generals.
I think it's quite self-explanatory in that this just ISN'T WHAT HAPPENS. Linux
is not bigger than Linus, no software is bigger than it's authors. Linus exerts
a fundamentally stable development model that no anarcho-syndicalist Free Software commune has matched in any other project.
Someone ALWAYS has to lead. I'd rather have Linus doing it than some lofty ideal
of free/non-free which is crippling Debian, or the GNU philosophy of stripping authors of everything but their ability not to get ripped off by their employers.
Neko
like GIMP and then get complaints "it doesn't read photoshop files" "it doesn't write CMYK",...
See?
Here's the way Linus views the difference between Samba and BK:
Anobody that compares that to Open Office (or even samba, which Tridge did write) is an idiot. Open office and samba are constructive projects that actually do something useful,and are technically advanced quite regardless of the fact that they can interoperate with the competition. They look at the file data because they then _use_ it (...)" (I bolded it).
Just so one has more context, before he said that, he also said: "Tridge could have done something constructive: he could have written the best damn SCM on the planet, and believed that open source generates better things, and competed against BitKeeper that way. (...) But that's not what Tridge did. He didn't write a "better SCM than BK". He didn't even try - it wasn't his goal. He just wanted to see what the protocols and data was, without actually producing any replacement for the (inevitable) problems he caused and knew about."
You can read the whole post here
Main difference between the BSD license and the GPL license: one is from California and the other is from Massachusetts
What is this BitKeeper stuff? How does it effect anyone, and who besides these 3 people care?
As every human being he can probably be an idiot at times (as Bruce so eloquently pointed out), but I'd apply the label "Evil" more to the likes of Monsanto , Diebold or Halliburton and their executives.
They are the ones that try to monopolize our food supply, they are willing pawns to disolve democracy, or they just lie and steal from the general public.
This is evil. Being an idiot on occasion is not.
ich bin der musikant
mit taschenrechner in der hand
kraftwerk
Okay, BK pulled the free license scheme due to the looming potential of reverse engineering. Everyone is up in arms about this announcement as now having "spoiled a good thing" and the backstabbing/name calling ensues.
Linus instantly laments the tremendous CVS tool he once "had" and enjoyed. Although he has now started to code his own replacement, states that this will likely never still quite fill the void.
The thing I don't understand... it isn't like the whole BK project was shitcanned. The whole right/wrong issue as an aside for the moment... the question begs to be asked: why has this turmoil instantly trashed the future use of BK for Linux kernel development?
If BK is THAT much better/easier/faster (as Linus has emphatically said) why not just pay for a license for it? I haven't heard any mention of what the new licensing structure would be... are we talking tens of thousands of dollars, or again is it just the thought that devoted Open Source developers would have to pay something (or anything at all) to contribute code?
Is the issue all ethics and priciples like it seems?
Or is the true reason BK is now being abandoned the sudden realization that the entire future of Linux kernel development was a tied too closely and too dependant on (and therefore at the mercy of) BK?
Or is it the fear that contributions to the Linux kernel will now plummet drastically since probably very few open source devotees will agree to pay a licensing fee (maybe just out of principle) to help develop code the cause?
I'm guessing the Linux group is probably the largest single BK user base... if they can't sell the tool to such a high profile "account" then who exactly does BK expect it's going to license to now?
It's almost like BK is saying "I'm gonna take my toys/code and go home"... not realizing that at the end of the day they will have no one to play with. They may win the battle but lose the war.
I just don't think it's all entriely rooted in IT "ethics" like we are being led to believe.
If anyone does know the projected cost/structure of the licensing scheme (if it's been announced at all that is) please chime in because that seems to be the one important missing element in this entire discussion.
Um, since when is Linus Torvalds posting on a web board called "Real World Technologies"? I see Darl McBride is also posting in the same thread, and so is of course Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. I am rather stunned nobody in this whole discussion seems to doubt that this post by "Linus" is actually genuine...
1) For 90+ percent of the computing public, it's inevitable. They're neither irresponsible nor stupid. They're software users. They can't even tell the difference. To them, all formats are proprietary.
2) While open standards are lovely (maybe--we all seem to accepting that without proof), the moment someone decides that an extension is necessary, the lag while it's argued over by the world community seriously impacts time-to-market. Then there's the implementation time, followed by the adoption time by all the other software competing for the same market space. If you add Nifty New Feature(tm) to your Open Source-based product, the odds are that you'll have to serialize the data associated with the feature. Suddenly, you're forced to wait until The World Agrees(sm) to deploy the new version of the product. Market advantage is lost. (Don't start with me. Developers and enterpreneurs need to eat, too, and their kids need braces just like everyone else's kids. Whether you [or I] like it or not, software is a business now.)
3) Inability to innovate privately is incompatible with a free-market economy. I like a free-market economy. It's made me a buttload of money and it's going to continue to do so. Whether or not Linus Torvalds ends up in a public argument with somebody is so below my radar....
Buttkeeper was basically designed for Linus - of course he likes it. It's a custom solution designed for the way he prefers to work. No one else really cares what revision control system they have to use. I've used at least a half a dozen over the years as I am sure most Slashdot users have as well - they are all basically the same. So Linus, stop your whining and grow up. Putting GPL meta-data in a proprietary format in the first place was stupid and was doomed to fail. Worse yet - he made this decision unilaterally without consulting all the GPL Linux code contributers. I'm surprised the unholy Buttkeeper/Linux alliance lasted as long as it did. I'm glad Tridge forced the free software community to wake up and eat its own dogfood. Tridge: 1, Linus: 0.
Just because Larry's paranoid doesn't mean everyone isn't out to get him.
While that's true, he did a supremely effective job of erecting a 10-mile high neon arrow above his head, pointing at himself and saying "Self-Centered Dickhead Tosser".
But who cares about McVoy. The really bad thing that he has done is to brainwash Linus into completely losing the thread here.
Next Linus will be telling us that it's bad to reverse engineer Microsoft protocols. This is going in a bad direction, for Linus.
But this was just about the shaprest analyzed and most compassionate and emphatic comment I ever read on Slashdot.
I thank you
ich bin der musikant
mit taschenrechner in der hand
kraftwerk
Bruce Perens is a self important A$$hat who has nothing important to contribute except his zealotry and religion, and anything else that will keep himself in the spotlight. If he had any sense he would shut his own mouth and make the world a better place. It's people like Bruce who are turning people away from linux.
I think this can be forgiven, especially after you clarified your point.
Thank you, Jesus.
Who do you think you are, anyway?
Pope of Slashdot? You died for our posting sins.
Tell you what - I forgive YOU for being such a knob.
Linus did the right thing because all the open source SCM solutions sucked for the past few years.
But they don't! http://aegis.sourceforge.net/ is free, absurdly powerful, and I can't imagine why Linus doesn't consider it, unless its the line in the aegis docs about kernel development being difficult if you follow the normal aegis process of requiring successful test passes - but (a) you could just turn of the tests and (b) that's because at the time those docs were written, a two machine setup was the way kernels were developed - but UML or Xen on one physical machine make such tests far more practical, even useful and desirable, for large sections of the kernal than they were a few years ago.
1) wrong. even those who don't have a clue can hire someone to make something with an open-standard-formatted data. but if the data format is secret, NO ONE can do nothing with the data, except the creator of the format.
2) right.
3) I would like you to correlate why an openstandard is incompatile with a free-marked economy.
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
Tridge: 1, Linus: 0
Well that wouldn't be so bad, but unfortunately I think it's more like:
Tridge: 1, McVoy: -2, Linus: -10.
That's what makes this episode so really sad.
I just hope that some really close friend of Linus's (and no, I don't mean McVoy) sits down with him over a couple of bottles of scotch and explains the said truths to him. His mental shutters have closed down all around him atm, he just can't see what's obvious to the rest of the world.
They're neither irresponsible nor stupid.
Oh boy. Go talk to the "man on the street" some time. But to be fair, plenty _aren't_ irresponsible or stupid, but ARE ignorant: Every person of normal adult intelligence who just hasn't thought about the issue that I've explained the ramifications of proprietary data formats to is pretty pissed off at them.
Inability to innovate privately is incompatible with a free-market economy.
While the government-enforced monopolies of copyright and patent law exist, your'e not in a free market economy, by definition. In the complete absence of such laws, you would still be free to innovate privately, you just wouldn't be able to shut down competition in the free market with government heavies anymore once you went public with your innovation. I very much doubt you've made a buttload of money in a free market in software, anyway, because there is no free market in software at present. Maybe it was the free market of baking (though I expect in the corporate reich of america, they now allow patents on baked goods or whatever along with everything else "under the sun")
we must ask ourselves "What would Brian Boitano do?".
He'd surely kick an ass or too, that's what Brian Boitano'd do.
+1 Funny.
While I basically agree with Bruce completely on this particular issue, there's something a bit ironic about Bruce, who has quite a reputation as a hothead himself, telling the usually unperturbable Mr. Torvalds to "cool it".
:-)
:-)
This is certainly true, but it doesn't alter the subject matter being discussed here.
One day Bruce will get it wrong too, I have no doubt --- we all do, we're human after all. And then we'll all come down on him like a ton of bricks as well. Such is life.
But in this case, Linus has simply lost the thread entirely, and since he's ignoring pretty much everyone in his deranged state, some high-profile harranging from Bruce might actually get through to him.
FOSS is in some danger at the moment, and I'm surprised that the anti-FOSS brigade hasn't tried to capitalize on Linus' mental abberration yet. Let's hope he wakes up soon.
It's like one of those JaRule/50 Cent/Eminem beefs!
the free SCMs had the problem of being 10-100x slower than BK.
they were not "about as good". there is an enourmous different between taking 20-30 seconds to process a patchset and taking ONE HOUR doing it.
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
Linus chose the best tool available to get the job done. It happened to be a closed source tool. The productivity of the LK team over the past three years testifies to the value of the tool.
In the meantime, Tridge tries to reverse engineer the network protocol. It's one thing to pay for software and then try to reverse engineer it for interoperability. It's another thing to take something which somone has offered to the LK community and violate the conditions of that gift. If you can't see the difference, your ideological blinders are obscuring your vision.
Linus has every reason to be angry. Someone took away a very useful tool from him. I'd be pissed.
I have discovered a truly marvelous sig, unfortunately the sig limit is too small to contain i
What BitMovers has done is essentially donated money (in the form of 'gratis' software)
I think you're being too generous in that characterization. In many respects, BitMovers donated a liability, not money.
and he is now paying the price.
Stallman is right.
Anyone seen Bruce in Revolution OS... he is such a fucking pot head.
This (and other) article mentions that Tridge was reading data off the wire in an attempt to reverse the protocol. They also mention that Tridge does not use the software so he isn't bound by it's license agreement.
If he doesn't have the software, whose wire is he getting the data off of?
To be honest, from an ethical standpoint, I would be pretty pissed if a company freely accepted my software and licensing terms, then sat people around the guy who was using the program who did nothing but watch the data going out the wire in attempt to reverse engineer the protocoll. It would seem to me like at the very least they accepted the no-reverse-engineering clause in bad faith.
paul reinheimer
....I don't, and I don't see why I should care about his opinion. A little more info in the intro, slashdot!
Michael Jackson was trying to tell us he's "bad" way back in the 80's...
It's not his fault no one believed him.
-metric
GSD: Gnu Software Distribution
These kinds of flippant, childish tone by OSS leaders, especially on the subject matter of how to functionally destroy a business' core market, really don't help OSS to gain mindshare in the business place.
For reverse engineering over the wire, he needs a server, and a client, and a tcpdump alike thing to see what is happening.
That, according to my understanding of BK's license is prohibited.
plain and simple.
Now, it can be argued that he hadn't agreed to the license, but, pray tell me, how the hell he got access to a network port between client and server (which is kinda necessary in reverse engineering over the wire) in the first place?
This
I can't see how this affects The Register's credibility.
Well, you see, reading beyond the first line before you post is against Slashdot roolz, so it's a pretty serious offense.
It seems Tridge wanted to circumvent the client license by developing a producet that got at the metadata without using the client.
Yes, that's absolutely correct. Tridge has every right to access the Linux source code's GPL meta data. It is not property of Buttkeeper.
If you do have access to Larry McKnob's product do us all a favor and export the entire Linux tree's meta data into any format (SVN would be fine) until the community can transfer it to the eventual revision control system that is agreed upon.
I'm not going to do flame-wars in public with anonymous trolls, but I'll respond once just because RWT is not slash-dot.
And you, my anonymous troll, probably didn't do anything constructive in your life, so this argument probably went way over your head.
Linus
Dear Linus, it is great that you refrain from adding to the Slashdot chatter because someone would have to mod you flamebait for being such a prick. And leave your belly button alone.
... he own his popularity, prominence and way of live on a big measure to the work of people that promote OSS.
At least for an elemental respect for the people that have been in the good and bad times all these years Linus could take an infomred approach to OSS issues.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
I'm not disagreeing that Linus is a great leader. I also think that Linus losing control of the kernel is a Bad Thing.
But it seems pretty clear that if he annoys enough people with seemingly conflicting moves like this, he will lose control.
Hence, Bruce Perens told him to "cool it".
Don't you get it? Nobody thinks Linus is an idiot. People think Linus can *be* an idiot.
What it comes down to is this: nodody is infallible, everyone makes mistakes, and sometimes people need a slap to wake them up. Furthermore, it might be hard to recognize that you're infallible as long as legions are fanboys are dancing around chanting that you're not.
s/infallible as long/fallible as long/
As mantainer of the kernel, an OSS application, he his (or should not allow himself to be) under any commercial pressure.
He is suppossesd to be taking the best technical decissions. If the SCM tool to continue kernel Dev did not exist, then he should have lead to find the correct tool. Stalling development of the kernel could have been a great incentive to concentrate everybody's minds.
The ones with commercial pressures are the likes of Red Hat, Novell(Suse), perhaps IBM and others. They can always fork the kernel, use whatever tools they need (commercial or otherwise) and then give back as they have to under the GPL.
Once the correct tool is available the Linus could have integrated commercialy sponsored changes back into the reference kernel.
Linux is working because in general people are being sensible about developing under the GPL. It is completely insane that you get this far licensing under the GPL and then, when the going gets a bit rough, you use a closed source solution, which in reality is not necessary because there is (or should not be) commercial pressure to fix things.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Not only that, it's common, not to mention freakin' pointless.
Our company has a new, small competitor that we heard some good things about. So we wanted to play around with it and take a look. Know your competition, and all. They refused to let us look at a demo or even sell it to us. Even if the purchaser was buying it for their home machine via a home email. Oh, you work for X, you Can't Have It.
So, we bought a license through a third party anyway. We only have, oh, maybe a few thousand personal and professional friends in the computer industry who are willing to help us out.
The ones using the BK client. They can do it for you.
I'm simply addressing the whining about lock in. How can Linus be locked in, when he can (well could have) converted the entire repository whenever he wanted? How can anyone be locked into a proprietary product if that same product provides export to numerous formats?
Neko, you're a stupid troll. Go away.
It was a tremendous error for Linus to use BitKeeper on a GPL project in the first place. It shows profoundly bad judgement for the future of the kernel effort. Was it really necessary to switch from having virtually no source code management, to using a proprietary product using a decision-making process that disregarded the opinions of 100's of developers? In the controversial years that BitKeeper was used a suitable free alternative, tailored to the kernel development process, could have been done several times over. Perhaps it is finally time to consider life in the Linux kernel after Linus?
an ill wind that blows no good
"bistromathics" ? Isn't that that new math were the answer's always zero?
"$xxx when in fact the user would have done without if it had cost even a tenth of that...."
The only thing people are "doing without" is the "paying for" part.
Every person of normal adult intelligence who just hasn't thought about the issue that I've explained the ramifications of proprietary data formats to is pretty pissed off at them.
I'm sure you explained it to them in an objective way, as well...
Are you a JW of OSS?
* Back in the 2.4 days, Linux was disorganized and uncomfortable with all version control systems.
* Larry knew that Linux using Bitkeeper would be good PR and a good way of getting free Beta testers and user focus groups, so he offered Linus free licenses of Bitkeeper and offered to tailer it to his needs.
* Linus tried it out and felt comfortable enough. His productivity soared, and Bitkeeper was in.
* Thus was born a strategic alliance that everyone knew would end some day.
* Some kernel programmers balked, so Linus made sure that there was a CVS mirror and ensured that old-style patches got the same priority.
* Things quieted down and the productivity continued.
* People started working on alternatives to BitKeeper because they knew it would end.
* BitMover started to get paranoid that the alternatives were starting to catch up and knew that BitKeeper was a driving force for the sudden interest in BitKeeper alternatives.
* Instead of saying, "This isn't working for us any more. We'll phase out our free licenses and we'll all be happy", BitMover picked an arbitrary excuse to get out.
Overall, I see that Larry, Tridge, Linux and the rest of the group did nothing wrong. until the last bullet where Larry is just being a git. He had the opportunity get out of it with everyone happy at what was achieved for both Linux and BitMover, but instead he chose to play himself as a victim.
Hit the road Larry, and by all means, let the door hit you on your way out.
"It has nothing to do with being evil. Trusting your data to proprietary protocols/fileformats is irresponsible and/or stupid. You turn over your control of your own information. It actually makes very little sense."
And yet societies wouldn't exist without a certain degree of "loss of control".
"Well, I'm actually no Open Source advocate, but I don't see how you can put a price tag on software, like that. Would OSDL have spent that much money if McVoy hadn't contributed the software? How much of a contribution was it really, if he's now revoking it?"
How can one put a price on anything? The entire universe is valuless.
"It's too bad that this has to happen with Torvalds in the spotlight, but maybe it's for the better in the end. What's being shown here is exactly why Closed Source is bad."
It's only bad if you lose the will to make a choice.
"What kind of logic is this? I honestly don't know where to begin. You know, at the end of the day, it doesn't even matter. I'll say it again, it's awesome that it's been displayed here in the clear that this is exactly why proprietary formats/protocols are Bad(tm). It's called lock-in and apparently everyone but Torvalds knew about it."
Socities by definition are a form of "lock-in".
Come on people. Linus told long ago it chosed Larry's tool because there was nothing in open source world that was nearly as good. And 2.6 kernel and the speed it was being developed is more than enough proof of that.
On the other side, Larry made a deal. And he made a really good deal. Too bad it wasn't enforcable (both for him and Linus). I'll give you the best tool that exists on the planet for free, and in exchange you are not going to reverse engineer the protocol it uses. You can develop competing tool with its own protocol, though. This sounds like a good deal for open source comunity too. If anybody cares what I think about it. Open source comunity got a freebie.
So, while there is nothing unethical about reverse engineering the protocol, it is unethical not to keep the word you gave. If Larry struck the deal with real organization ("organizatoin" in legal sense of the word, as in legal entity), he could as well go to court and win. Easily. Luckily, it is virtually impossible to sue "open source comunity". Who exactly are you going to sue?
If anybody wants to hear my opinion, it was more than clear that somebody is going to backstab Linus and do exactly what Tridgel did. Come on people, Tridgel knew exactly what he was doing. Deal between Linus and Larry wasn't a big secret. It was spelled in big words: you may use it for free as long as nobody attempts to reverse engineer the protocol.
Deals are deals. When somebody breaks it, there is no deal anymore. It is that simple. You may be religious about the issues involved. You may be emotional. Or you may be cool headed. Whatever way you choose to react, you can't change simple facts.
"Why reverse engineering the smb protocol should be considered a good thing, while reverse engineering the protocol bitkeeper uses is beyond me and though Linus has come out strong against the latter he still didn't explain how he can still consider the former to be a good thing."
Depends on the purpose of said action. Is it to free up one's data? Or is it to build a complete replacement of BK? The former means that one' building a client to the repository. The latter means that one is building both a client and a repository.
"And above all, I think Linus is behaving very unfair towards Tridgell, who has done nothing illegal, didn't break any contract, but just did what he has done with other things already, which were always considered to be a good thing. Why doing the very same thing considered good in other circumstances now should lead to Torvalds attacking him is again beyond me."
Sometimes things aren't always about "did so and so violate a license". But the more pragmatic "Is doing so and so going to have bad consequences on others who had no say so on my actions"? Karma if you will.
"It's pragmatic to to reverse engineer proprietary to gain access you need. Linus is not pragmatic here."
And what about those CVS gateways then? Why couldn't the community mirror, the content if "access" was really what bothered them all along?
MS did not provide SMB for Linux; BitKeeper for Linux was available for free to open source developers. How about this for difference? Adding SMB to Linux added functionality. Making BitKeeper client into open-source does not add any new functionality; just scratches Tridges' itch. The time he wasted could have been spent on writing something really NEW.
Developers and enterpreneurs need to eat, too, and their kids need braces just like everyone else's kids. Whether you [or I] like it or not, software is a business now.
Ok, maybe it is societies' responsibility to provide you and your children with food and basic medical care if you are unable to do so yourself. But I don't see why anyone else should care if you make 'a buttload of money'. It's your task to find people who are willing to pay money for your services and enter into a voluntary contract. If customers want open standards or open source, find a way to make money off that or someone else surely will.
Time and time again Microsoft has pretty much come out on the "reverse engineering is a game" position. That is companies have the right to try and reverse engineer Microsoft protocols and Microsoft has the right to make that hard by changing stuff. So I'm not sure they agree with Linus but rather with Trigdell.
As for what we have; some kind of socialist/facist/Orwellian nightmare.
If everyone in the world switched to using bitkeeper, then legally no other source management software could be developed. Think about what a shitty restriction that is.
cyn, free software and *nix operating systems enthusiast.
...he said he wants the phrase "Cool It" back.
Mr. T pitied this fool on 27 July 1992.
FOSS is in some danger at the moment,
No, perhaps the linux kernel is having some troubles, but FOSS is not in trouble. KDE is getting along just fine, as is FreeBSD. GNU might be in danger, but only if linux completely dies and HURD once again proves to not be ready.
Personally I don't believe there is any danger to linux. There might be a slow down, and it might last as much as a year, but there is no great danger. Other projects have gone through their own troubles. (OpenBSD/NetBSD split, the WINE license change, all were trouble, but the projects got through them over time and are doing fine now)
and I'm surprised that the anti-FOSS brigade hasn't tried to capitalize on Linus' mental abberration[sic] yet.
So am I. Though there is nothing here, it is the type of thing they generally would try to play up as something major in hopes of slowing us down.
Let's hope he wakes up soon
Yes. Hey Linus: WAKE UP!
That's MPAA/RIAA/BSA math and you know it.
According to McVoy, it cost his company $500 000 a year in staff costs to maintain the OSDL-version of BitKeeper.
So no MPAA math here, and I know it.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.
I hate to indulge in more remote amateur Torvalds psychoanalysis, but this strikes me as the real puzzle, where did he get his absolute hatred of other version control systems? Even the admittedly clunky CVS has been sucessfully used to manage some huge software projects (gcc in the open source world; and I've seen it in use on many large proprietary projects, like Irix and Netscape).
My theory: he likes simple tools when he can get away with using them (vi vs emacs, shell vs perl) and started out with an aversion to source control in general. Then he had to keep arguing with people pushing for CVS, and he got backed into the position of being a version control snob, who refused to touch anything but the Very Best. Then his friend came along and showed him a nice shiney toy.
You're coming down on the side of "immediate expediency" in this debate, but a lot of us are taking a longer term view. You don't go beserk winning a battle if it risks losing the war.1) It may take longer to develop such applications. So that would be the first requirement to go. (Do I use ASN.1 to describe my over-the-wire comms or should I use my own quick and dirty UDP protocol?)
2) 90%(TIC) of open source is actually a copy of something else, so any new formats are always ready to be implemented. However the immediate implementation is usually in the form of a new open source app with the newly created format.
3) This is so easy its not even funny.
a) Buy into a proprietary system, because open source/open standards based applications aren't visible/viable to PHBs. (Face it, very few open source/standard applications are seen as viable compared to an application that extends the open standard with proprietary extensions. This is for large "enterprise"-wide business systems, not some firewall or ethereal limited use app.)
b) The cost of said proprietary system appears cheaper (hence more value), since you have a large pool of developers who are specialized in said proprietary environment (given the developers see the proprietary system as a major share of the marketplace. Plus open source/open standards guys are usually more expensive, IMO. But its quantity not quality, the real incompatibility between the market and open standards.)
c) To protect its position in the marketplace, the proprietary vendor will continue to add features on top of any currently argued open standard. They'll take your features and add more so that they aren't compatible for complex applications.
>I want to understand why there is a difference between
>the two types of reverse engineering in his mind.
I don't think reverse engineering is bad or good per se.
Reverse engineering something is just technology. It's a "thing". It's neutral. It's not "evil" or "wrong", or anything at all. It just is. It's a tool.
What makes using any tool bad? It's the intent, and it's the disregard for consequences, and disregard for other people. THAT is what is bad, regardless of the tool.
So when you ask "why is reverse engineering good or bad", you're asking a totally nonsensical question. And when you claim that a tool must be either good or bad, and that circumstances and how you use a tool don't matter, you're really not making any sense.
There are no "types of reverse engineering". You're being a git. That would be like saying that there are two kinds of guns - those that are used for good, and those that are used for evil. That's totally idiotic.
Creating something new and useful is a good thing. What the "tools" used to do so are doesn't really come in to whether you did something "good" or "bad". Tools are just tools. But if you hurt others in the process, that absolutely does matter. And if you don't actually produce
anything useful, that also matters.
(Which is not to say that everything has to be useful to be good. Hey, as long as you don't hurt other people, who cares what you do in the privacy of your own home? Think about it. That really does end up being how you're remember: did you hurt somebody, or did you help people? Seriously, THAT is what matters in the end.)
But whether you used a gun, a hammer, a pen, or your brains to do whatever you do doesn't really matter. See? The tool isn't the issue. The issue really is whether you ended up doing something productive.
I agree with Bruce Perens for the most part, but I think many people are not addressing Linus' argument directly (even though I do not believe it is a valid one!)
Linus does not believe that Trigdell did anything wrong by reverse engineering bitkeeper. He believes that what he did wrong was knowingly break up the "agreement" that Linus and McVoy had only to see the protocol. Trigdell did not intend on making a compatible client (or any software for that matter).
Perens does touch on this a little bit by saying Linus should not worry about what Trigdell does in his spare time (legally). I agree. If Linus and McVoy's agreement was that weak, it should never have been relied on for something important. For many people, developing free software is a hobby. Samba started as a hobby. If Trigdell wanted to examine BK's protocols as a hobby, that's his right.
Perhaps Linus is not being a dunce in this situation. Perhaps he sees that his friend Larry is enraged and irrational. Perhaps Linus is willing to put the welfare of the kernel above his own public image.
If all of the above is true (and that is a big if), then it could be that Linus is blaming Tridge and praising Larry in order to ensure that there is a smooth transition from Bitkeeper. If Linus came out rooting for Tridge isn't it likely that Larry would yank Bitkeeper immediately and not allow a smooth transition to some other solution?
We don't see the world as it is, we see it as we are.
-- Anais Nin
The real problem is copyrights. From the time all of us were young - we were told that copying things is stealing, and a betrayal to those who create, and that it is pro buisness, and anti-communisim, and it is a moral right to restrict what other people copy because it's a property right.
So now the GPL comes along with the attitude that copyrights are wrong, and lets fight fire with fire attitude - and understandably alot of people can't handle it. Nor can they face that "the slave states can't get along with the free states", because they just can't see copyrights for the violation that they are.
But the truth is copyrights are not a property right, and have nothing to do with property. And they are more like a government granted monopoly/regulation on how people use information than a pro business property. And when you think about it, those who impose copyrights are really the traitors because they are the ones who have taken tons of knowledge and information from society freely - only to build on it and try and fence it off using lawsuits, bullying, and the force of government.
The truth is that copying is not wrong, and that the information age demands the free flow of information, just like the industrial revolution demanded the free flow of labor (eg the end of slavery) even if all hell breaks loose to do it.
I don't think that matters. OSDL has a BK license. As Tridge was employed by OSDL, it appears Larry (and possibly Linus) thought he was bound by their license terms. Tridge didn't feel that way. Because it was Larry's license, he got to interpret it as applying to Tridge's work. End of story.
I don't mean to troll; I am genuinely interested. Why open source? I have seen some arguments that say it is more secure and that it saves money, but I have never seen an argument as to why it's more secure, and how it saves money. I have nothing against open source, I use Firefox daily and have toyed with Linux (Slackware and Fedora Core) but open source doesn't matter to me as much as what the product does. So, I ask again, why does open source matter (again not trying to troll, just gain an understanding).
I would hate to work for your employer - if he signed an agreement that all male employees were required to spend non-working hours picking potatoes in a field, would you go get fitted for wellingtons?
If Tridge's contract has an explicit clause in it forbidding him to perform such research outside of working hours, then that is one thing - but I would be astonished if OSDL had such a clause in ANY of their employment contracts. And regardless, as I understand it, there was not some magical "company wide" agreement to be bound by the T&C of the BK free licence, regardless of if you use BK or not, but an individual requirement for anyone using BK to conform to the agreed licence. Now, its possible that there was a non-standard contract requiring that OSDL protect the IP rights of McVoy, but I dont' see how that could apply to random employees of OSDL unless their work required them to be in contact with BK or their contract with OSDL explicitly stated this to be the case. Of course, if you have access to some contract or licence that grants OSDL the right to enforce restrictions on what their workers do in their free time, feel free to post it - I am sure we will be fascinated and astonished.....
-=DaveHowe=-
Agreed. Linus made a mistake to start with, by adopting Bitkeeper for the kernel. Current events prove that it was a mistake. What we're seeing now is Linus being reluctant to say "I screwed up, let's try to move on" -- instead, he's still acting as though his original decision made sense. In a situation like this, Linus does need a strong response to point out to him that he's in the wrong on this, and has been for a while. Bruce is doing what has to be done.
Just so you know, your attempt at neutrality here is really piss-poor. You're getting all flustered because people don't see the OBVIOUS!!!1!! after you invoked full impartiality. That's just so clumsily misleading: you simply agree word by word with Torvalds. Just say that, what's the problem?
I could post some quote and a link too, to the effect that it's obvious how what Linus is doing is hurtful to the Open Source community, and implying that you are a moron for not seeing that. But I'd rather listen to the valid points on both sides, 'cause apparently reasonable people can disagree on this, and when I speak I like to acknowledge that I too have an opinion. Maybe that's just me though.
I wish people were less anal about this whole supposedly-oh-so-tragic "breaking the license" thing, and recognize the important work that Trigdell is doing. Given the man's track record, what's sensible here is to assume that he's doing this in the interest of the whole community and that his work will help others eventually if not immediately -- NOT the opposite. "Willful destruction"? Give me a fucking break. Linus has always known the contradiction inherent in using BitKeeper for Linux and it was only a matter of time before the incompatibility became manifest. This is Open Source dynamics at its most classic. If Torvalds, after imposing his choice on the other developers, thinks he should be able to control such dynamic flow (which is Free-As-In-Freedom), he's wrong, and he's being thoroughly petty in his temper tantrum about it. McVoy is also being petty, and is the only one who's really hurting his software right now. If he really cares about his intellectual property, he should know better than flat out act like an asshole towards the entire Linux dev community.
See? No need to parrot anyone. However, if you'd like to open your mind a tiny bit and take another look to what Perens is saying, do try this link.
Have a nice day.
hawk
You don't need to know anything about automobile engines to understand why buying a car with a hood that can only be opened by the dealer is not a good idea.
What the heck are you talking about? There's nothing about any open source or free software license that makes you wait until anyone agrees before you release code.
Smart developers and enterpreneurs are learning to make money off free software. Hint - people want services and systems.
Nonsense. Copyright and patents that make knowledge private are state interventions in the marketplace; free software is closer to true free market conditions than proprietary software.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
No, I don't mean bruce.
I mean seeing a couple of pepole getting reprimanded on manners by a native New Yorker--who appears to be right!
hawk, diehard western boy
I'd be disappointed too if a person who had cooperated and facilitated my efforts over a many year period was being taken advantage of by my allies.
Lets posit that BitKeeper contributed to the success of the Linux movement/project by providing a superior free capability that wasn't there before and did it at some expense charging nothing (but gaining some good karma/publicity).
Now you can reverse engineer legally. But should you?
Or should you allow that deviation from OSS purity because that person/company tried to be helpful to your efforts?
Would you be upset that something so bound up in your way of doing your work (which many consider vital to the OSS) is attacked in such a way as to cause you to have to change the way you do your work? At a cost of disruption and productivity...how many fixes aren't going to get reviewed as thoroughly because Linus has to switch the way he works (and even go off and develop an application like SCM)? Kernel guys are precious. Linus is especially vital and any distraction from his efforts to produce the best kernel possible is bad.
This is ridiculous and unproductive discussion. How about instead of pointing fingers (read: shut the f*** up, Bruce, you're no help here), we start a more open discussion of how to solve the SCM crisis Linus/Linux find themselves in?
Open Source SCM solutions are crap compared to BK at solving the distributed source code problem (as stated by Linus). Personally, I think they are crap at many other aspects of SCM as well (access control, ease of use, ease of administration, etc.). We've had a surge of new Open Source SCM tools crop up recently, but either they went unsupported by all but the initial developer, burnt out at 0.3.1, or failed to solve any really useful or interesting problems (Subversion, for example), or made design decisions that make installation/maintenance a nightmare (Subversion again).
Perhaps a UI wrapper around Arch (which has the ugliest command line interface known to man) would be a start. Or perhaps some additional tools to help with Darcs. Or perhaps Linus is right and we need a completely new tool that _actually_ solves the problem (if these don't already).
The point is, let's discuss moving forward and stop wasting our breath on stupid accusations. We're acting like children, for Christ's sake.
putfwd.com - 1GB Free file storage with a twist
Ok, lots of arguments about closed/open, but the bottom line is: bitkeeper was made available free of charge. There were of course conditions involved in this deal, but they were quite non-restrictive. No one was forbidden of working in free solutions. Linus Itself was clear about his willingness in embracing open tools once they meet the needs. Nevertheless, it's a deal.
It's a fact that only a few individuals who develop the kernel are bound to OSDL, but OSDL is the entity to whom Bitkeeper was handed and thus is expected to go along with the deal.
Tridgell is bound to OSDL, just like Linus. He was expected to follow his employer's commitments.
People can argue endlessly about if Bitmover overreacted, if Linus' initial decision was wise, it open source is the one and only way, if reverse engineering is good or bad, if Linus is a moron , etc. I have no strong opinions about that.
But the bottom line is: Tridgell did something unnecessary just because he wanted to.
If you do not like the game, get out of if or change it. Linus is pissed because he lost a precious tool because of actions wich did not had any useful goal. This is stupid and I give him full reason in this respect.
And you're too much of a pussy to get an account and show who you are.
And?
Neko
Paranoia means an unreasonable fear of persecution. You can be afraid of things that only exist in your imagination, and still be at risk from things in the real world. If I believe that George Bush and the Prince of Wales have directed the CIA and the Freemasons to reprogram my refrigerator to eat me, then I'm paranoid -- even if I don't notice that my best friend is plotting to kill me because he's in love with my girlfriend.
IIRC, the claim was that the free client was costing $500,000 worth of revenue or some such thing, not that there had been a $500,000 donation to OSDL. The number is still propoganda as it presumes a lost sale for every free client in use. I can't help counter-speculating about the business value of having your (then brand new) commercial RCS/SCM put to use by a software project with Linux's public profile.
Personally I think one of the central issue of this conflict is Linus' claim that Tridge "just wanted to see what the protocols and data was, without actually producing any replacement for the (inevitable) problems he caused and knew about".
I wonder how Linus can know that. How can he make this claim without providing any supporting evidance for what he believe Tridge's intention was. To me it doesn't seem to be anything more than a wild and totally biased speculation.
Consindering Samba took years to become somewhat usable, it's fairly evident "over the wire" reverse engineering takes time, and to expect Tridge to come with a "replacement" right away is in fact pretty sureal.
So what happens to your vision of a pragmatic, purely technically-oriented leader who just wants to "have fun" and write good code?
(If anyone's interested in this subject, I recommend reading the Torvalds as-told-to "auto"-bio: "Just For Fun". Torvald's dad makes RMS look like the CEO of GM, it's no wonder he's got an aversion to explicit moralisms... but on the other hand you can also see in his behavior an implicit internalization of what you might call moral behavior, e.g. an instinct toward genrosity.)
Perhaps this is old news, but it is worth repeating...
Monotone's change log
Sun Apr 10 17:49:25 PDT 2005
0.18 release. performance improvements, features, and bug fixes.
This release is dedicated to Shweta Narayan.
- most operations sped up by a factor of 2 or better; many sped up by up several orders of magnitude.
- special thanks to Matt Johnston , Derek Scherger (derek@echologic.com), Linus Torvalds (torvalds@osdl.org).
Lets not forget that IBM owns all rights to probably the most complete SCM tool on the market. They could do more than just help a little if they were so inclined.
Look at the title of your post, read LInus' writings on this, and it is clear that you (among many others) are completely wrong.
Data lock-in is not an issue here. Full meta-data export was already written (where do you think Linus got his data for his new system, that he is now writing instead of writing the kernel, from ?). Export for any format could have and would haave been put in by Larry, and according to Linus this was "not enough" for Tridgell.
So, if data lock-in (a valid concern and obviously a good reason to talk to your vendor and agree export routes and formats...) was not the issue, what was it ?
If the format is open, you know (and have) everything necessary to use the data. If it isn't you don't. The idea that the known is preferable to the unknown is common sense.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
This article should be required reading for Linus Torvalds fan-boys.
-Don
A Slightly Skeptical View on Linux
"I also think that Linus' cult of personality is one of the most significant negative moments of the movement for various reasons propagated by such different people/groups including but not limited to Eric Raymonds, Slashdot founders, Slate's Andrew Leonard, Linux distributors, etc. That's why this chapter can be considered as a modest attempt to address "Linux mythology" issue. All-in-all in this chapter I will try to paint a vivid picture of a talented, colorful and sharply individualistic Linux dictator: one of the most fascinating figures among open source pioneers. It's important to understand that this chapter was written as an antidote to publications emulating North Korean party newspapers articles that depict achievement of the party leaders with just substitution of Linux and Linus Torvalds in several places ;-)."
Take a look and feel free: http://www.PieMenu.com
As to the license question, you are frequently bound by agreements your employer makes, although not normally on your own time. If you don't like it, you can leave, or take them to court over it.
Regardless of the legal issues, it appears that Larry probably felt that what he was doing was not in the spirit of the license, and Linus felt it not in the best interest of the developer community.
In the end Tridge stood by his legal rights, continuing to examine the wire protocol, and Larry exercised his right to determine how BK could be used. Linus stood in the middle, lost out in the process, and wasn't terribly happy about it.
The story here is Larry's perception of what Tridge was doing, the actions he took as a result of that, and how Linus viewed the whole thing.
Larry has put the first nail in BitKeeper's coffin by causing Linus to decide to write his own tool. Linus may not be the greatest PR person, but when it comes to computers, he knows his shit. Get a good team behind him, and you'll have a BitKeeper-killer in no time.
You just corrected the spelling of "Hanson" on /.??!
It looks like most people who have replied haven't read this. (AFAIK, this wasn't reported on slashdot, but was on the Register. Another reason to have sources of news other than /.)
Its rare (to non-existent, apart from some companies who try to claim all IP originating from an employee even out of hours is theirs) that conduct out of working hours is covered. That isn't always true (for example, people sacked recently for having a blog their employers didn't like) but I would expect anyone actually sacked for their out of hours conduct to have a fair case for unfair dismissal and compensation.
-=DaveHowe=-
Last year, I had to see my preferred political candidate for president lose the race all because he made the fatal mistake of expressing enthusiam during a political speech in Iowa. Boy, he was an idiot for doing that. Not like that great thinker GW Bush, and all the brilliant things he's said. Or that superior thinker, John Kerry, who knew never to express an opinion on anything other than he's a better candidate than GWB. Or fight back hard when slandered by a bunch of political operators like the "Swift Boat Veterans".
The lesson to be learned here is that anyone can be portrayed to look like an idiot. It doesn't mean they are. More important, one must closely observe what the pack of jackals say. Then you have to be able to discern the untruths and misreprentations. Then realize what are the consequences.
Realize that F/OSS is a philosophy. It stops being a philosophy and starts being an ideology when its proponent try to coerce their views on people with a different philosophy. Much like how people think the U.S. must conform to a Fundamentalist Christian value set. (After all, is it wrong to value life? Or the gov't showing respect to the Christian God? Aren't public schools denying religion by not permitting a Christian prayer in class? Or teaching something we don't believe because its relies on scientific research and methodology for its arguments?)
The key thing here is observe the positions that F/OSS zealots take, and the tactics they employ.
The problem here was that quite a few, if not the majority, of developers did not want to use BK and chose not to use BK. It did not prevent them from making contributions to kernel development. So how did Torvalds compel developers, against their will, to adopt a tool?
But as Torvalds points out here, its baseless. But gee, it sounds real scary, doesn't it. And who cares if its claptrap? So many Slashdotters think its the reason why Torvalds was an idiot to adopt a proprietary tool!
That's because F/OSS zealots Orlowski and Perens prefer to misrepresent Torvalds' position. Torvalds does not attack reverse-engineering, he attacks Tridgell for messing up his agreement with McVoy WITHOUT PROVIDING AN ALTERNATIVE.
Tridgell is not "literally not allowed to reply". He will not lose his job if he replies. Tridgell merely does not have the character to publicly defend his beliefs if it will result a (miniscule) risk to his financial wellbeing. (But he's more than happy to dismiss McVoy's concerns towards his financial wellbeing when he conducts his reverse-engineering activities.)
But perhaps Perens is right. Linus is being severely unfair, the way people are being unfair about commenting on Scott Pedersen during his trial, and Michael Jackson during his trial. This world is ridden with filthy, unethical people. Oh wait, Tridgell is not actually under indictment. I guess Torvalds should respect Tridgell's reputation and desire to protect his financial welfare after Tridgell screwed Torvalds' deal with McVoy, and gladly suffer the glaring misrepresentations made by Perens and his ilk. (See Swift Boat Veterans.) Oh yes, the hypocrisy!
Folks, its really simple. F/OSS ze
There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, General Electric, and Exxon
Fuck GNU, their compiler is crap and they whine too much.
...for linux in 2005. So many things are happening and changing, i'm already looking forward to the 'linux in 2005' overview at the end of the year ;)
On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.
Ya know.. there is always another possibility... Linus is burned out. For many people that are unusually productive in a specialized area, burning out can be quite startling and depressing and it may come out in unexpected ways. This whole bitkeeper thing may just be a precipitating factor. It may also just be another micro-burnout that has happened a number of times over the years.
And you know what? So What. If the kernel "forks" so what. Whether people know it or not, the linux kernel is developed by a core team. They're the ones that get together at the kernel summit. There is enough scalability amongst akpm, alan, greg-kh, rusty, etc to take over a lot of the management duties that Linus was involved in. Remember that for the most part, only a small percentage of the development work has been done by Linus.
After all, isn't Linux just reverse engineered Unix?
Now that Linus has apparently lost what little sanity he seems to have had, is this going to spook folks away from Linux and towards other "freer" operating systems, like the BSD variants?
Because of the size of Linux distros, and the time spent in paring them down to a reasonable size, plus the fact that FreeBSD's TCP/IP stack has traditionally been faster than anyone else's, we've been slowly migrating our production servers away from Linux and towards FreeBSD. This is just another reason to start moving away from Linux - first, Linus saddles the kernel development community with a proprietary product in deference to another person's business and against common sense - then he attacks Andrew in public - a person who has done an enormous amount for the open source community - over what is simple re-engineering, something that almost everyone has done over the entire course of Linux development. In fact, Linus himself used Minix to build the first Linux kernel, so Linus can be considered the father of re-engineering in Linux. I find it more than a bit hypocritical that Linus is viciously attacking someone else for doing what he himself has done in the past, all because his friend wants to try and protect his business model.
Making business decisions based on personal feelings gives us a very bad feeling, especially when those bad decisions, followed by even more bad decisions, are being made by someone who has sole and exclusive control over a large part of *our* core business. Better, we think, to move away from an autocratic and arbitrary style of management and towards something a bit more democratic. Linux has slowly moved towards the William Jolitz autocratic style of management that characterized 386BSD, and which ultimately spelled its downfall. Linux is bigger, so it will fall much more slowly, but I think it *will* fall eventually, and for the same reasons that Linux initially overtook 386BSD.
-- Ed Carp, N7EKG erc@pobox.com PGP KeyID: 0x0BD32C9B What I'm up to: http://intuitives.mine.nu
And I believe VS.net has a licensing clause that says you can't use it to develop a word processor, a spreadsheet application, or a Front Page clone.
"Seek first to understand." - Socrates
Here we have Larry - so worried that someone might potentially be working on a competing product that he was ready to put his foot down at the first sign of some random guy doing reverse engineering.
And what he got as a result? Now he has Linus himself working on a replacement product, and potentially some of the hundreds of other developers.
Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.
H.G. Wells, "The Outline of History"
I've read a ton of stories on this incident and I still don't know what the hell is going on.
It's like when you see two hip-hop bitches insulting each other over who dissed who first and talking about "rezpekt" and "don't you take my man from me, bitch" and "nuh uh I ain't going to no Lakers game without my purse" and "oh so you think 50 Cent iz better than 2Pac well nuh uh" but you can't figure out what they're SPECIFICALLY arguing about, they're just arguing for the sake of arguing over something that's probably woefully insignificant in the first place.
"Oh no he dih-in't!" -Linus Torvalds
Slashdot requires you to wait longer between hitting 'reply' and submitting a comment.
The email linked to and the quote from Linus are significant since they show that Linus was advocating that someone should make a BK --> CVS gateway which is just what Tridge was working on.
We don't see the world as it is, we see it as we are.
-- Anais Nin
"There are times when Bruce Perens can be a real idiot, and this is one of those times." What Bruce's statements demonstrate is that, like Stallman, he sees GPLed software as a way of intentionally undermining programmers' livelihoods. According to statements by both Stallman and Perens, they consider programmers are "evil" unless they give away their work. Linus, having worked in the real world at a real company facing real tough competition from the Big Guys (Intel and AMD), understands that people who work hard are justified in demanding that they be paid for their work. Linus personally wanted to give Linux away, and chose the GPL largely by accident -- because he saw it on the C compiler he was using. Had he looked more thoroughly into the various alternatives, or understood the full agenda behind the GPL, he might well have chosen Larry Wall's Artistic License or the BSD License. Of course, once he released Linux under the GPL (though he did modify it to allow binary drivers), he was stuck. What this incident shows it that Linus isn't a "Stallmanista." He doesn't have it in for his fellow programmers, as Stallman and Perens do. Which is a good thing, IMHO.
http://www.osnews.com/comment.php?news_id=10318&of fset=30&rows=37
"You can't patent ideas. You can patent methods. While one could argue that a method is an idea, in legal language (which is what matters in this case) the two are quite different. Reverse-engineering a protocol is quite legal, and any patent claims by Microsoft against Samba would be laughed out of court (especially since they didn't come up with the SMB protocol in the first place). It appears that the current dispute beween MS and Alacrity does involved patented technology, and thus Alacrity may have a case. "
> Linus exerts a fundamentally stable development
> model that no anarcho-syndicalist Free Software
> commune has matched in any other project.
Ever hear of Apache?
(Neko, you're a fucking idiot. Welcome to my Foes list.)
This is excellent:
/., but won't somebody please post a link to what he has actually said on the matter?? Without it, this whole debate is just speculative hot air.
We actually hear from Bruce Perens here on Slashdot.
But we still haven't heard from Linus. I haven't anyway; all I have heard is people criticizing him for what McEvoy says he said.
I can understand Linus being too busy or otherwise unwilling to post his viewpoint here on
1. He didn't use BitKeeper. He had people send him network activity reports and file repository dumps, but never actually touched the software himself.
2. Linux is theoretically, but not practically, run by Linus, because it can be forked. If the consensus would have been stronger that BitKeeper would be a Bad Thing for linux, the community probably would have run off and started their own branch that didn't use it. If you saw Linus's style of management as being military, this would be called mutiny.
I posted a question to Linus on the realworld list and he actually replied and clarified his position.
Below is the text of his reply:
It's really neither of those. I don't think reverse-engineering is bad. It's quite natural to be inquisitive, and all questions of "how does this work" are "reverse engineering" to some degree. And I might have been pissed off at BitMover, except they bent ove rbackwards trying to figure out how to continue things as well as possible. So disappointed, yes. Mainly because the whole thing seems so pointless. The tool that tridge wrote ends up being useless, and nobody won anything at all. But hey, I'm making the best of the situation. I wrote my own tools, and as usual (conceited bastard that I am), I named the new project after myself: "git". Linus
Oddly, in the license for DevStudio, MS specifically requires that "all code developed, compiled, linked, or otherwise processed by the SOFTWARE must be used in the production of a PRODUCT similar in functionality to MICROSOFT BOB."
Old people fall. Young people spring. Rich people summer and winter.
The Free Documentation License. I'm not as familiar with that one as with the GPL and LGPL. What, specifically is wrong with it? Is there a better license for documentation that you would suggest?
Just go with the BSD people. Basically this battle (and many previous ones), as well as many future ones, are battles of ideology, and of course the RMS position (by definition) is an uncompromising one.* You wouldn't be seeing something like this happening in the BSD community.
*And yes issues like this, and many, many others are why my code is going to be under a BSD-friendly license. I have better things to do than be fighting ideological battles with zelots, as I'm sure Linus does too.
And then you've just gotta smile at the self-depreciation.
I don't want to sell you death sticks.
I'm sure someone pointed this out before, but Bitkeeper's distributed nature means a licensee has to cooperate with the reverse-engineer, thus there is much breaking of terms.
I've read a few exchanges from the /. crowd, read a few statements by Linus and the gang, have read McVoy's interpretation of the BK saga, and have come to one conclusion:
No one but the three people involved in this fiasco *really* knows what happened to get this situation to the stage where people begin a verbal free-fire in public.
McVoy is a business man; true to his heart, he needs to keep the BK user strung out on his code. Hell, I would feel the same sense of outrage that he feels if someone threatened to kill my cash cow. Don't pretend that every one you wouldn't feel the same way if it was *your* revenue stream. To me, anyone who claims an absolute vow of poverty is looking for a monastery to live in. Everyone I know would fight to protect a source of financial income.
Selfish? You bet. But nature has created more selfish beings than egalitarian ones. Nature favors pragmatism.
But McVoy could have let this one ride a bit more. It is just a matter of time before someone cracks his model. Then he will have to play the same game as Microsoft and Adobe only on a different level. Too bad for him, though, that his inexpensive advertising scheme didn't last. That is another little detail that goes relatively "un-remarked" upon in the various forums I've read. Larry had one of the hottest programmers in FOSS using his SCM. In fact, this Man Of The Year lavished all kinds of praise on his progeny! You would have to pay more than the "free" license fee for that kind of advertising. Shit, probably A LOT more. If Linus had been paid for his endorsements, that could have added up to quite a sum of money. Larry has wisely kept those funds securely in his pocket.
Again, I'd do that too. The monks of this world can keep their vows.
Linus? Well, it was kind of hard to turn down a free license for one of the best SCMs on the market. If I had been in his position, I would have grabbed the product and ran. In fact, I would like to personally thank Larry for helping juice the Linux kernel development. I know SCO has been rummaging around in the Linux closet for evidence that it was their intellectual property that made the kernel advance so quickly. I believe that Larry's BK contribution probably made the significant increase in kernel production possible. Judging from Linus' angst and outrage, I think he believes that too.
But Linus is being a bit thin skinned. Does he believe he is the ONLY programmer that has been burned by relying on a proprietary product for their work? Didn't he listen to all the people who had been telling him about *their* bad experiences with proprietary lock-in? From what I've read in the past, they had plenty of legitimate worries that this was going to happen. I'm sure that Linus knew it would happen someday too. He's just pissed that it happened NOW as opposed to LATER.
Boo hoo, get over it, this too will pass, etc. But why attack Tridgell in public? Hmmm.... That does raise some interesting questions. And why get all bitchy about it?
There is something we are not getting in this little soap opera. Tridgell is silent, probably for good reason. But why would Linus take him to task knowing that he would not be able to respond publicly?
And Perens? This is a slugfest that only Gates, Darl, and RMS would love - all for differing reasons. Why does Perens feel compelled to call out Linus over his treatment of Tridgell?
I thought the points made by some posters about just how Tridgell was sniffing packets to see the metadata protocols is extremely insightful. To have BK protocols running on his network would require that he be operating a client and server somewhere where he could see it, no? What network was he sniffing if he didn't have a license?
What amazes me is that the attempt to get BK's protocols didn't happen *sooner*. With all of the pissing and moaning that erupted when Linus started using BK, I would have thought there would have been someone d
"Rocky Rococo, at your cervix!"
There is an anti-DRM provision that is so non-specific that placing a copy of a GNU FDL document in a system with login security could be a violation. It says something like "you may not use technical means to keep people from reading this document". Period. I disapprove of DRM as much as RMS, this is a matter of the license construction being a problem rather than the license goal.
The second one is a problem with the license goal, though. It's the "invariant sections" feature. You can designate that a section of a GFDL document can't be modified. A prohibition on modification obviously disqualifies the license as either Open Source or Free Software, most people can see that easily enough. The provision is there so that RMS can attach political statements or his version of history to documentation and have them stick. And thus he's not willing to talk about changing this. That has driven a pretty big wall between RMS and Debian, for example, since Debian will remove content not deemed as free from their system.
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
This is really the better place to start reading.
Please don't refer to RMS as a fanatic. Sure, he has some ideas that are difficult for many to accept, but they are well thought out, valid arguments. Take them or leave them.
Why Free Software? http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/shouldbefree.html and http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/why-free.html and more.. http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/
when it implies that Linus wrote every line of code in the Linux kernel? Nothing in the post can be taken seriously.
If you license your work under the BSD, it will always remain free. *Other people's* work that builds on your BSD code, however, may not be.
Remember, the GPL isn't about keeping *your* code "free", it's about making *other people's* work GPLed.
I think the biggest misperception is that Linus is an open source zealot. He has publicly made it clear many times why he wrote his own kernel in the first place. He was in college studying computer science. At the time he had a shiny new 386 PC that came with whatever Microsoft was offering at the time. He simply didn't like it and wanted to use UNIX. MINIX was available, but too expensive. So out of his own need and desire he wrote his own kernel and made his own personal choice to use the GPL. He respected the License of MINIX and left it alone. Linus has always been a man of principle and freedom of choice. He has always respected the works of others. When he created his kernel he didn't reverse engineer UNIX or anything else. He knew how he wanted it to work and that is how he went about it. I hate to say it but I have to agree with him on this matter. Don't bash someone for the license they chose. The point is that Linus has always been about using what works, else building what you really want. Bit Keeper worked for him. He was never concerned about the license, only what the software could do for him. Perhaps the silver lining to this is that he will sit down and write his own, since he aparently did not like any of the SCMs available. The downside to that is that it will interfere with the development of the kernel.
Linus is right. His priority is enhancing the Linux kernel and bases his decisions on what he thinks is best for the kernel.
Tridge is right. He saw something interesting and wanted to see how it works and set out to do so within the law.
Everyone can pick which motive they like best and flame on.
Pardon me, Mr. Perens, but I don't see that this provision would prevent someone with login access from distributing the document or making it available to someone without access, which is to say the security system secures the storage of a particular copy of the document, and not the content of it, as long as the secured system doesn't add any license conditions or prohibit users from extracting the document.
The actual license reads "You may not use technical measures to obstruct or control the reading or further copying of the copies you make or distribute."
Ergo, putting the document in a secure storage system in no way "obstructs" people from reading or copying from other sources. Otherwise, keeping a copy in a library would be a violation just because the doors are locked after-hours!
- Nickster
"Slow down, Cowboy! It has been 3 years, 7 months and 26 days since you last successfully posted a comment."
Exactly. The GPL is not at all about freedom, but rather about taking away others' work and freedom. Remember what inspired it: Stallman wanted to keep people from leaving academia to make a decent living at programming.
You do not know a damn thing about Tridgell, yet you carry on as if you do. Tridgell is a brilliant and ethical programmer - on par with Torvalds or perhaps better. You are not qualified to clean Tridgell's toilet, let alone discuss SCM for Free Software intellegently.
>According to statements by both Stallman and >Perens, they consider programmers are "evil" unless >they give away their work.
This is one misconception that I am growing desperately tired of...however like some kind of many-tentacled octopus, no matter how many times I try and step on it, it just keeps rising from the grave. There also admittedly aren't that many times when I'll come to the defense of RMS...but this *is* one of them. Go and read this. In it, RMS states that he doesn't have a problem with people selling GPL bound software at all.
The free/beer and free/libre debates and the associated misconception were ESR's entire motivation for adopting the term Open Source, so far as I know. Basically what Stallman says at the above link is that the ONLY demand that the GPL makes is that source be provided with binaries. End of story. To quote from his article:-
"Since free software is not a matter of price, a low price isn't more free, or closer to free. So if you are redistributing copies of free software, you might as well charge a substantial fee and make some money. Redistributing free software is a good and legitimate activity; if you do it, you might as well make a profit from it."
(Emphasis his)
I've started realising that it isn't actually so much RMS' philosophies themselves which bother me...it's the misconceptions that a lot of other ill-informed morons who claim to be his supporters develop and spread. RMS doesn't have anything against people making money from GPL-bound software AT ALL...He did it himself at one point with Emacs. He isn't Communist, and the GPL itself isn't, either. I repeat, all the GPL demands of people is that if you're going to distribute binaries in whatever manner, you also distribute accompanying source, so that said software has a chance to propogate itself. As long as both are sold together in the one package, you can charge as much money for said package as you like.
But as you pointed out yourself:
You may not use technical measures to obstruct or control the reading or further copying of the copies you make or distribute.
As I read it, the word you makes other sources irrelevant to the question. It's the copies that you make which must be readable.
It might take litigation to settle it. Good legal practice includes making sure your agreements are clear enough that you don't have to litigate their meaning.
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
You may be right about needing litigation to settle it, but my point is that an interpretation that broad is not really reasonable, because virtually no person (user, judge, jury) would interpret that to mean that you can't lock up your own copy.
It's sort of analogous to modifying GPLed code. You can make whatever modifications you like for your personal use and keep them secret, as long as you don't try to distribute that version to others without the source to the changes. That's how I read this FDL clause - I'm perfectly free to keep my copy under lock and key and let whomever I like in to see it, but I'm not free to give a copy to somebody with a password on it. Otherwise it would be like requiring me to make my copy available 24/7 to anyone who asks, e.g. store it on a web server, which is not reasonable.
I know! Let's ask Eben Moglen! :)
- Nickster
"Slow down, Cowboy! It has been 3 years, 7 months and 26 days since you last successfully posted a comment."
I just wanted to say that I agree with every one of your points.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
Anyone who believes that no source code management or CVS is superior to more powerful alternatives is showing "profoundly bad judgment".
I only point out that the kernel went from having no SCM to BK practically over night. A few months would have been sufficient to develop a new, free SCM system that everyone could agree with. What was the harm in waiting that long? Instead Linus made an autocratic decision that offended 100's of kernel developers, and put kernel development at the mercy of proprietary software. The worst thing that could have happened was that McVoy would recind the BK free client. That has now (predictably) happened. I call that profoundly bad judgement on Linus' part. Linus is becoming a most unsafe guardian of the Linux kernel.
an ill wind that blows no good
Tridge did not have a BitKeeper license and was not bound to it in any way. This is a case were a license between two parties was voided by the issuer for actions by an independent third-party. Anyone can see this was an unstable situation. Whether Tridge voided Torvald's agreement with McVoy intentionally or not is irrelevent. He was never a party to their agreement.
-Hope
You may not use technical measures to obstruct or control the reading or further copying of the copies you distribute.
This makes it sound a lot more like what you were thinking, tying the restriction to distribution. Adding the words intentionally or wilfully might also be helpful.
There is a further problem in the form of sending your friend an encrypted copy of the document. Your friend will be able to copy it and redistribute it to whoever he wants, but the derived work you distributed has a control on the reading. It could be argued that distribution doesn't actually happen until the encrypted version is opened, but that would be a pretty hard line to take, especially when considering the similarity to what this clause is trying to restrict.
In this area hides the hidden beauty of the GPL. You're free to distribute GPL data in whatever encrypted or DRM-encumbered fashion you desire, so long as an offer accompanies it to send a version with no DRM. (Of course, I'm not sure RMS would see it this way.)
What's more, HURD isn't finished and there's no problem with the concept of forking Linux anyway. If RMS wants a kernel now, that works, and for some reason dislikes something about the way Linux is developed, all he has to do is copy the entire thing to Savannah.org and appoint someone to maintain it. It is, after all, licensed under the GPL.
Torvalds has done some dumbass things of late, and criticising Andrew for wanting to create a Free Software client that interoperates with the SCM Torvalds has adopted is one of them. It's also downright unethical, given he knows McVoy is threating lawsuits, and Andrew is limited to the extent to which he can respond to Torvalds, and given the extent to which Torvalds is himself lying about what's happened.
Conspiracy? Nope. Just smart people doing dumb and nasty things.
Oh, and "Ovum's Barnett": If we agreed with you, we wouldn't have GNU based operating systems such as RedHat and Debian. Linus's little kernel would be an asterisk. Without people wanting certain basic freedoms when they receive software, we'd be using Windows and Unix. Why wouldn't we? I find it remarkable people actually pay you money to come up with this drivel.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
"Remember, the GPL isn't about keeping *your* code "free", it's about making *other people's* work GPLed."
Warped, man. Really warped.
The GPL *is* there to keep YOUR code free. I don't want you taking my stuff, repackaging it as your own, and selling it closed-source. Fuck that. I didn't spend time and effort writing something to give away to everyone, only to have some dipshit company make money off it.
If you want to take my code and change it a little, you STILL can't sell it closed source. You have to make those changes available to the public. I don't see how this is a bad thing?
The reason GNU/Linux has so much momentum and populatiry is the GPL. If it weren't for the GPL and Linux, the *BSDs wouldn't be as popular as they are today.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
you're a dumbass.
Hmm, 6 months ago I played with GNU/Hurd and definitely it could do more than just print out an excalamation mark. Heck, I ran a boa (a web server) on the Hurd box at that time. Ran an sshd so that I can access the box remotely.
I haven't had a chance to play with it recently, but I monitor a mailing list related to it. There's definitely progress. Please give it a try.