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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."
McVoy's great triumph was the adoption of this program for Linux development. No free software project is more visible than Linux. It is the kernel of the GNU/Linux operating system, an essential component, and users often mistake it for the entire system. As McVoy surely planned, the use of his program in Linux development was powerful publicity for it.
Yeah, RMS is all about Free/Free but I see it as an important step for all software. Free stuff that isn't "totally free" is *not* wrong.
I would like to make my personal feelings known that non-totally free stuff that is later taken away because someone didn't learn "no give backs" is lame.
Yeah, RMS is right about a lot of stuff and really does have vision but I just have to disagree w/him here. Not everything has to be free.
Yes, he is saying the same things as always. The same things he's been saying twenty years ago. And still, the rest of the world keeps behaving in exactly such ways that his words apply perfectly, again and again. Makes you wonder who's being more stubborn, exactly.
Dude, his whole point is that the KERNEL should be called Linux and a system built on it should be called GNU/Linux. So, no, it's not too funny.
No, the priorities are different. For a long shot, he'd consider it more important to create a free tool to do the task well, than to just do it with a non-free tool. It's just that, to him, freedom is more important than anything else. So, it's very natural and consistent that he'd rather first write the free tool and then do the task, instead of the other way round (and probably never get around to writing that free tool, anyway).
Agreed, sadly, that this is typical human nature. It is also the precise mechanism throughout history by means of which freedom gets lost.
Whatever happened to "every hole has a peice to fit it, some peices require different tasks to get them. Some require money, others require some code"
There's tons of people with that attitude, it's just that they're the ones who don't feel a need to scream about it.
William of Ockham had no beard. The most likely explanation is that it was chewed off by squirrels every morning.
they're called visionaries because they have the insight to see things the average person cannot see.
in ten years, we will all be thanking RMS for his foresight - or lamenting that too few people took him seriously enough to avert disaster...
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Software can be distributed w/o charge but does not have to be 100% free. Why he insists that this is the case is only understandable by him and people that are just as warped as he can be.
This whole incident is why software should be 100% free. Had BitKeeper truly been opensource Tridge (or anyone, for that matter) could have simply forked it and kernel development would have continued on. All this whole incident proved is that when your development is determined by the whims of a single entity you run a very significant chance of getting burned.
Linus might not be able to get people to follow him next time. Linus went out on a limb for BK big time. He took a strong political position that the majority of his followers disagreed with and convinced them to go along since it would all work out pretty well anyway, the software was really good and would make a huge difference, the license was fair enough, Larry is a good guy...
All of this has been proven to be nonsense. Larry while a good guy years ago is basically an asshole taking positions on software that would embarrass Bill Gates. The software used didn't make anyone's job easier with the possible exception of Linus's. It only made Linus's job easier because he is being stubborn not wanted to change a bad work practice. The license wasn't close to fair enough. Linus lost some "approval rating" over this, the next time will be much harder for him.
We just watched David Dawes's and co. unwillingness to listen to their developer's make them lose control of a core open source project that had been amazing succesful well beyond even its original scope. I'm not saying Linux would fork over Linus doing another boneheaded move but he might encounter more opposition this time. There are lots of players that aren't thrilled with his leadership on other issues as well.
If Bitkeeper had been a game, very few here would have complained about the fact that it's not truly free, and one wouldn't expect Linus to be terribly annoyed in the face of Tridge's actions.
But Bitkeeper was used in the role of a mission-critical piece of software. This is not really any different in importance than the kernel you run, or the database engine that stores your critical information, or the office suite you use, or perhaps even the web browser you use.
What makes those pieces of software so important are the consequences to you if they should fail to function properly, or if their use should suddenly be taken from you. They're mission-critical, or (perhaps) infrastructural in nature -- their importance is much higher to their users than that of much of the software that's out there.
And so, the importance of them being truly free is also much higher.
I sometimes wonder what the consequences to the Linux kernel today would be if Linus had taken a few weeks off to write the revision control system he wants and needs, rather than to deploy Bitkeeper. He'd have to stop accepting patches to the Linux kernel for that period of time, of course, but the submitters of the patches in question could certainly sit on them until he was ready, no?
In any case, I agree with RMS that there's a lesson here: if you use proprietary software for mission-critical work, you're essentially giving control over that mission to someone else. Think about that carefully before you choose.
Use 'slashdot stuff' in the subject line in any email you send me if you want to get past the spam filter.
IE is free once you get above software.
No matter what tool or code you cite, I can cite closed code that is very cheap or no cost.
We are not in this just to save money, if that is what you are thinking you have missed the entire point of free software.
Where have you been?! The lack of incentive for US students to enter the software industry is due entirely to the lack of jobs available once they graduate. Those jobs have NOT been replaced by the use of open source software. They have been replaced when software development is outsourced to India, or elsewhere.
And secondly, why would the software industry suddenly die with open source? We would still need software. Thus software would still need to be written. IBM and HP pay people to write open source software. Now I'm not saying that all software SHOULD be open sourced, I agree that's ludicrous. I'm only saying that it could not kill the software industry.
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
Yeah, and the means by which freedom is gained -- if I produce something that is useful and people are willing to pay for, I can eat.
For the same reason you get to vote for your President. Do you want to be in control of your environment or do you want to trust someone? The Constitution provides an assurance that you will never have to blindly trust a leader, because in the end this trust is always broken.
Likewise for software - the GPL is an insurance policy against someone else controlling what happens on your computer in a way that requires your trust.
Actually I have no problem with Free Software as in beer or speech. I also have no problem with paying for software if the price is worth the value I get from the software. Bitkeeper did not IMHO have any free version ever. To use the "no cost in money" version you had to sign away your right to work on anything might compete with it! For me that price was always too high. I consider that to be the least free license of all. Imagine a programming tool that limits what type programs you may work on! I more often than not find RMS and his fanclub to be too extreme but frankly I find the Bitkeeper license to extreme in the other direction.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
So let me get this straight. If I work hard, charge for the fruits of my labors, I'm the bad guy. Well that just puts every FOSS fan right in the same camp as my less savory former employers. "Why should I pay for what you're doing?"
"Why should I do it?"
"Because I pay you to."
"So your question was again?"
Except in the case of FOSS, the reason I should do it is because the users simply insist I should. WTF have they done for me lately? Stroked my ego? Read the docs I custom tailored to their intelligence level? Nope. "Code should be free!"
Fine, you invent it then. I won't write anything. I'll simply schlep others' code around, fixing your machines instead of improving on them.
No? Well then, pay me what I'm worth.
What I want to know is where did we suddenly decide that shareware should go the way of the dodo, and we instead of being upstanding and honorable decided to go with stingy grubbing, however open and honest the gimme gimme mentality is?
If you like to put out work for free, give it some protection, but otherwise let anyone use it for nothing, that's your right. I would do it myself in some situations. But Free != Good. Sometimes Free == Tyranny of the Mob.
If my grammar and spelling are off, I am [distracted/tired/careless] (take your pick)
Personally, I'd say that this is the first time I've really understood RMS's point of view, and agree with him.
While bitkeeper was "free as in beer", when someone pissed of Larry, he took away the whole software. Also for a long time he's said people haven't been able to use it if they work on competing products.
If it had been GPLed, then someone couldn't have decided to just withdraw the software just because some did something they didn't like. Now the kernel has been left in the lurch. This kind of thing is exactly what RMS has been telling us would happen for years, and this is the first time I've really seen it happen.
Combination - fun iPhone puzzling
This for me is an important point. I may be an eccentric, I am certainly a slightly lapsed Quaker, but for me one of the most important things in an ethical business is price transparency.
Before any libertarian gets started, this is not an anti-business attitude. The object of stock markets, for instance, is to provide price transparency as well as liquidity. This is one of the things that makes markets trustworthy: things take place in the light of day, not by private agreement.
I do not have a problem with charging for software and support: I do believe that it should be standard business practice for software companies to have a clean and transparent pricing model so that it is possible both to compare products by TCO, and to know that by using XYZ software you are not paying through the nose while XYZ is doing a cheap deal with your competitor.
My beef with MS, for instance, is that I cannot buy Windows alone for the same price as buying it bundled with a PC, plus the belief that the price of the various Microsoft offerings is related to negotiating ability. It is not a level playing field, and this is probably worse than being a monopoly. A monopoly that screws everybody equally at least encourages everybody to look for a way round it, rather than seeking to produce power alignments that keep it in place.
By following this "the price is what you negotiate" approach. Bitkeeper cannot avoid the suspicion that people who advocate its use might be in a visible industry position and be getting a special deal.
To anyone who says that this is excessive idealism, I would suggest that I do not have a problem with price variation or special offers provided they are freely and openly advertised. I am not in favor of limiting the ability of companies to respond to market conditions. I am opposed to secret deals.
Anybody who questions this might compare the laser printer and copier markets. Historically printers have been engineer-driven and tend to sell to a price. Copiers have been salesman-driven and the vendors have tried to hide the real costs in complex leasing and contract details. It isn't surprising that, as buyers become more aware, power starts to shift to the printer manufacturers. Nobody likes copier vendors.
Scott Adams (who is an economist as well as the creator of Dilbert) has summed it up well by using the term "confusopolies" to describe the vendors of mobile phone contracts etc. who seek to conceal the true costs.
So, in summary: Bitkeeper's business practices as regards the cost of their products causes me not to want to buy them.
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
Instead of inventing an ethical principle out of his head (something theoretical and Utopian like, say, Marxism), he grounded it in the common practice around him: people can do this stuff (disassemble, share, etc.) with the physical objects they own, why not with the software? This reasoning (if I understand it correctly), in this particular instance, seems very old-school conservative / traditionalist to me.
Slashdot: Failed Car Analogies. Amateur Lawyering. Anecdote Battles.
Tell me about it. One of the big problems in the FOSS world is that OpenOffice, a very important open source program, is using more and more Java. In OpenOffice 2.0, many of the core wizards and their database components are written in Java. Whereas Java was pretty minor in past editions of OpenOffice, Java is a major dependency in OpenOffice 2.0
Some people have said something on the lines of, "What's the problem? Quit whining and crying, and wake up and smell the Java. Download the JDK, and fall in love with the new-and-improved OpenOffice." The reason why FOSS users aren't too fond of OpenOffice's use of Java is because the Java features are currently Sun-only; the free Java compilers and VMs haven't implemented all of the Java libraries and features at this time. Many of those Java libraries are also underdocumented; even though the core language is well documented, the Java libraries aren't.
Secondly, the Sun JDK is very hard to install. The license is very restrictive. Even if had no problem with the license, if you're running Linux on anything that isn't a x86, or if you're running BSD, then installing the Sun JDK ranges from very difficult to almost impossible. OpenOffice's use of Java could alienate users of "unsupported" platforms that are capable of running OpenOffice, but can't because its dependency, Java, can't run on it.
OpenOffice looks ripe for a fork. Aside from its Java issues, OpenOffice is very big and bloated. Why does it need its own widgets and font-handling system? How come the applications cannot be distributed modularly? Why must it inherit some of MS Office's quirks?
If OpenOffice forks, it should be similar to Firefox; get rid of all of the integrated bloat and start working on perfecting the individual applications. Get rid of Java just like the Mozilla people did when they got the Netscape sources. Separate the interface from the underlying portions.
Even if you're fine with proprietary software, expecting open source programmers to stop doing what they do is not reasonable. If BitKeeper had something worth cloning, it would be cloned. In the meantime, Larry managed to bootstrap himself a company using the free advertising Linus gave him.
All this whole incident proved is that when your development is determined by the whims of a single entity you run a very significant chance of getting burned.
Sorry, but this arguement just falls down flat. Linus seems to be having no problems moving away from BK to another solution, so the kernels development is NOT determined by the whims of a single entity other than Linus himself. Since BK made a significantly positive contribution to the workflow of the kernel developers, I would offer the opinion that the whole Bitkeeper saga has been nothing but positive from the start to the end, despite what RMS and others may have you think.
I believe that sourcecode should be at the control of whoever created it or paid them to create it, its their investment so why should a random person have the ability to fork it on a whim, unless the codes owners agree to that in the first place by CHOOSING to embrace such a move and opensourcing their code by freewill.
RMS isn't in this to save money, he is in it to preserve freedoms that are important to him.
Linus is already working full time on free software under RMSes favorite license. Let him use Visual Studio, SourceSafe and Word ...
OSDL should have recognized that Linux is a more important project than reverse-engineering BitKeeper and told their employees not to do that on company time/servers or get fired.
Question: If Linus HAD been using VS, SourceSafe etc, and it had been Microsoft who had been pissed off about Tridge's reverse engineering of protocols, should OSDL have layed down the law against Tridge as well?
Should they have said "Linux is more important than Samba, so Tridge has to stop working on it to make sure that Linus can keep is Visual Studio license"? Since when does a proprietary software developer get to hold the community hostage by threatening to pull its licenses? How stupid do you have to be to consider that a good thing?
I like extremists. Not in the direct sense, but in a lot of other ways.
Firstly, they force me evaluate my own beliefs and principles. Why is democracy good? Why is Free Software worth bothering with? What could possibly be wrong with drinking alcohol?
Secondly, most movements in history was seen as radical or just plain whacky. Don't think you are allowed to sit at the front of the bus, woman. Oh no, the sun is clearly rotating around the earth, Mr. Astronomer. Without them, we would still be living in caves and killing our food with spears. No, not even spears, because that guy or gal probably got ridiculed a lot at first. We would be throwing rocks.
Third, the limits of our society are shaped by the extremes on each side of it -- the nuttier the sidelines, the more stable it is in the middle.
Also, some of these dudes are really entertaining, and it is always completely unintentionally...
Sorry, but this arguement just falls down flat. Linus seems to be having no problems moving away from BK to another solution
Writing your own version control system is no big problem?! That's a BIG problem in the books of most developers, even though Linus is a great programmer he himself admits that his solution is nothing more than "a stupid (but extremely fast) directory content manager". So going from a really nice SCM like BitKeeper to this is a big deal no matter how you spin it.
The fact that you and many others have a problem with "This whole 'ethical' line of argumentation" vs. a "mainstram economic argument" is probably the biggest single reason we have debacles ranging from the Enron debacle to the scandal plaguing the Canadian government at present. Please explain how an economic argument "holds more water" than an ethical/ideological one.
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It doesn't matter what sort of political or economic philospohy you subscribe to, when pure economics takes precedence over "ethics" then the said economic or political system becomes corrupt and vulnerable to collapse. Slavery did not end in America because someone had a convincing "mainstram economic argument" against it. Nazi Germany did not fall because it had an inferior economy. We triumphed over both because they were morally reprehensible (sorry, but I didn't spot the pre-requisite reverence to Nazis in this
I recently came across an interesting example of a compelling argument for "ethics" in business. The "Chik-fil-A" fast-food chain was founded and is headed by a very conservative, evangelical Christian. This man and much of the staff wear their religion on their sleeves, and unlike most visible personalities of the "religious right" they seem to actually practise whay they preach--their beliefs, faith, religous observances and family are of the highest priority--more so tham profits. The head of this company insists on not doing business on Sunday and on directing a portion of profits towards philanthropic activities as a sort of "tithe". While I do not subscribe to his brand of religious conservatism, I respect him highly for following his beliefs because they are the "right thing to do" even when there was no "mainstram economic" argument to do so. It is in some way like Google's well-known policy (at least in this forum) to "do no evil".
The result? Chik-fil-A has undergone rapid growth and has virtually the best employee retention and customer satisfaction in the industry. And we all know how Google turned out.
As for the maturity exhibited by the "unbunched panties of the BSD community"--what has that achieved for them? The many variants of BSD are certainly excellent from a technical perspective and are popular for web hosting and security, but there is a reason for the "BSD is dead" jokes--it is invisible to the general public and has no presence at all on the desktop. RMS and others might come across as wingnuts at times, but it is their dedication to ther beliefs and their inthusiasm for the free software movement that has made GNU/Linux as successful as it is.
You may view RMS' idealism as giving ammo to the opposition, but I prefer to think of it as a kevlar vest. The key is to stick to your principles while being informed and aware so you don't shoot yourself in the foot.
Free in Free Software refers to liberty, not cost.
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