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Tridgell Reveals Bitkeeper Secrets
wallykeyster writes "The Register is reporting on Andrew Tridgell publicly demonstrating how to interoperate with Bitkeeper. During his keynote at the Linux.Conf.Au, Tridgell connected to a BitKeeper site via telnet and used the mostly forgotten "help" tool. Ethical arguments of aside, what really counts as reverse engineering anyway?"
One of the things that a lot of people miss is that Tridge wasn't just reverse engineering some software that reads a Word file. He was reverse engineering the protocol that BK used on their servers.
What if Tridge wrote something that totally hosed the kernel source on BK's server? People would be screaming bloody murder at BK for letting it happen. One of the reasons BK kept their stuff closed was so they could take accountability if anything went wrong and now exactly how every client was accessing it. That's one of the advantages most managers see with going with a commercial company rather than a OSS solution.
This isn't just copying functionality, it's putting a widely used system at risk because you don't agree with their practices. That's the same philosophy espoused by a lot of virus writers.
Find me in ~/.sig
He used a dirty word... mod his fucking ass down!
Homer Simpson said this best:
Boooring!
Who the fuck cares about this?
you know that how?
:)
turns out in real life my name is Jeremiah. My life is becoming more and more like the Biblical Jeremiah's life in that i'm right a hell of a lot more than anyone else and all they want to do it shut me up for it.
so fuck ya all.
What would he accomplish by forking Subversion and spending a year to get a workable replacement of BK? Isn't that equivalent to starting from scratch with GIT?
And who the HELL are you to be telling Torvalds how he should spend his time?
There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, General Electric, and Exxon
Oh, wait. That's morally "wrong". So says the guy working on a clone of the UNIX operating system. Something doesn't quite add up here.
UNIX was and is open source. That is one of the reasons why it survived and spread heavily in the Universities and in commercial variants as opposed to VAX. Hell even the first DOS OS had bits of UNIX in it. Linux was not the first OS to learn from the original UNIX. See SUN, AIX, BSD, and just about any other *NIX that has come out since the original Bell Labs Unix was written. However, BitKeeper is not open source. If BitKeeper wishes to keep their source proprietary then it is morally wrong.
Good to Write you FUCKING USELESS NIGGER ASSOCIATION the NetBSD project, dim. Due to the lead developers of HIV and other Sadness And it was