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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."
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.
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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