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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."
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"
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
One of the things that makes FS/OSS so attractive is that things aren't about spin (yes, there is always going to be some spin, but nothing like in your world) but about the code and about technical excellence.
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Stop, you're killing me!
buttkeeper was basically designed for Linus - of course he likes it
Buttkeeper was designed to allow revision mergings between different developers (collaboratively) while keeping proper tracking of what merged with what, and what merge took precidence. That ends up in efficiency for Linus and likeminded developers. Why should Linus prefer an inferior or, in this case, non-existent tool?
It's a custom solution designed for the way he prefers to work.
And why shouldn't a developer chose which tool he prefers to use? Ah, because to use a tool that isn't GPL is the moral equivalent of oppression. Is that why the GPL zealots' feel justified to run a smear campaign on Linus because he DARED use a proprietary tool? After all, look at all the work Perens and Tridgell do for the kernel. They're justified to make decisions for developers that manage the project and do the work. They're justified to misrepresent and make half-baked rationalizations.
No one else really cares what revision control system they have to use.
Then why do the GPL ideologues make it such an issue? Why can't people respect the choice that Linus made to use the tool he preferred?
So Linus, stop your whining and grow up.
God forbid Linus should express his side of the story.
Putting GPL meta-data in a proprietary format in the first place was stupid and was doomed to fail.
Who CARES if the GPL meta-data is STORED a proprietary format? The source code can get dumped out by the client. The changeset information can get dump out by the client. What is being denied to the GPL zealot?
Worse yet - he made this decision unilaterally without consulting all the GPL Linux code contributers.
How DARE he decide what SCM he preferred to use! How dare he suggest the other developers can go use something else!
I'm glad Tridge forced the free software community to wake up and eat its own dogfood.
I'm glad to see you're admitting it was Tridge's actions that precipitated the event.
There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, General Electric, and Exxon
Actually, perens was trying not to insult torvalds. By saying he can be an idiot sometimes, perens was implying that torvalds wasn't a bad person and didn't do a bad thing on purpose but merely out of idiocy.
Idiot... "The Register". "®". Get it?
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.
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.