Slashdot Mirror
RMS Weighs in on BitKeeper Debacle
mshiltonj writes "You know its what we've all been waiting for: RMS weighs in on the BitKeeper debacle. An excerpt: "I want to thank Larry McVoy. He recently eliminated a major weakness of the free software community, by announcing the end of his campaign to entice free software projects to use and promote his non-free software. Soon, Linux development will no longer use this program, and no longer spread the message that non-free software is a good thing if it's convenient."
RMS uses Linux to mean the kernel just not the whole OS. In this case he did mean Linux.
> An Open Source project is being killed because the highest authority in Open Source OS namely Mr. Linus, decided not to use it and now the rest of the community is cheering it. Way to go guys.
;)
Uh-huh, right......
BitKeeper is not "open source." Nobody ever got the source outside of Larry McVoy's company. BitKeeper is proprietary software that you normally have to pay money to use. McVoy allowed "free" use for "free" software projects and Linus chose to use it for managing his end of Linux kernel development.
After Andrew Tridgell showed how you could connect to a BitKeeper repository using netcat to see what the "protocol" does, Mr. McVoy said no more "free" BitKeeper for you and went home.
No Open Source or Free Software projects were harmed in all of this, except that now Linus is going to develop his own tool for managing the kernel code instead of using something that's already available, because apparently, he's tried them all and decided that none really work for him.
Just be sure to wear the gold uniform when you beam down -- you know what happens when you wear the red one.
Linus Torvalds could say, tomorrow, that he revokes everyone's right to use the parts of the Linux kernel he wrote. That's his right as copyright holder.
No, he can't.
From the FAQ
Linus can redistribute code he has written under another license, but he cannot revoke the rights he has already provided. He can also make it so future releases are under a more restrictive license, but someone would just end up forking the last GPLed version.
A good example of this is XFree86. Version 4.4 was released under a more restrictive license that the community did not like. Next thing you know, the last 4.4 prerelease under the old license was forked as X.org.