Linus on Subversion, GPL3, Microsoft and More

victor77 writes "Linus has repeatedly slammed Subversion and CVS, questioning their basic architecture. Subversion community has responded...how valid is Linus's statement?" This and many other subjects are covered in this interview with Linus.

Comments

Re:Article

[DaleGlass]

Subversion works, but like Linus says, it's nothing wonderful. You can hardly point at some feature of it and say it was the product of a genius. It does CVS right, and that's about it.

But SVN is limiting. For example I have a fork of the Second Life source, and SVN was PAIN for that. I ended up switching to SVK because it was the first thing I found that could sync with a SVN repository (which is what LL hosts), but Git would probably be also a fine choice as well.

SVN's problem is that when you want to branch somebody's source but still follow it by merging improvements it becomes really painful. You have to use svn-load-dirs, which is a hack. You have to give it megabytes of source to process, which can suck really badly when you've got your SNV repository hosted externally so that other people can access it.

Re:Can't RTFA...

[SnowZero]

No Linus wrote Linux as a reimplementation of BSD Actually Linus started out rewriting Minix as a hobby, and it just so happened he chose the right license and was good an getting people to work with him. It amazes me that after all this time there are still people who don't understand why Linux succeeded... it was by building a better community, not technical superiority. BSD has had a great technical history, but quite a few community problems, leading to community splits and forks. Linus, as a good manager, has managed to hold Linux together, which is an achievement in itself. Of course, with open source "win" and "lose" isn't that meaningful; Linux and *BSD are healthy and continuing in their development. Who cares if your community is the biggest, if your community develops the software you need.

during the period that AT&T sued to stop the distribution of BSD. Had BSD not been held up in court, there would have been no need to rewrite BSD from scratch using inferior networking code. So, with the SCO suit, BSD was able to make a comeback, right? Or, maybe you are overestimating the impact of the lawsuit. Also, if the BSDs could not stick together, what makes you think all the Linux people could work with them? Theo and Linus sharing the same CVS repository?... I doubt it.

When Novell bought AT&T's Unix labs it ended the frivilous lawsuit against BSD, but by that time, Linux had gained so much marketing buzz that it overwhelmed both commercial Unix and the free BSD, serving to water down any hope for either of the candidates to prevent the expansion of Micorsoft's DOS and
the promise of NT and Cairo. Except that the "frivolous" lawsuit actually did find offending code. The only thing that saved BSD is that AT&T/USL had stolen even more code. You can call the lawsuit stupid, annoying, or disrespectful, but there was an element of truth to it. The community should have policed itself a little bit better. To this day we still here software companies decrying open source's disrespect for copyright and properly policing the code; which IMNSHO is fallout from the original attitude taken when BSD was being developed. I like open source too, but the way to go about it isn't by ignoring the licenses for code, no matter how small or insignificant the amount. Hindsight is 20/20, but that was an important lesson.

By the end of the 90s, Unix vendors had mainly squabbled amongst themselves, BSD had been largely overlooked, and Linux had expended millions of dollars in efforts to reinvent a perfectly good wheel. That allowed Microsoft to take over the desktop. This makes no sense to blame on Linux. The BSD license allowed commercial forks, so they happened, while BSD failed to market itself and grow its development community (instead it forked). Meanwhile Linux was doing its own thing, but was it "wrong" for not spending its funds on supporting BSD instead? If you look at all the money ever spent developing Linux, its probably less than what was spent on one of the major commercial Unixes. Why is this ok in the business world, but not in the open source world? Also, keep in mind a lot of recent investment in Linux is precisely because of the GPL; IBM would not support development of BSD code, as that might help its competitors closed-source products.

Meanwhile, Microsoft successfully marketed a desktop, and took over a market many feel a free Unix could have occupied. Of course, in that case you should blame X-Windows and the slow development of broadly supported GUI toolkits. Both of those run on both Linux and BSD, so I don't see why this should be blamed on Linux. I guess Linus should have written a BSD-licensed version of KDE to make you happy?

Once again, technical superiority is not the only thing that matters. It isn't true in business, and it isn't true in the open source world. Building a healthy community and a working development process is just as important for long term success. And, like in business, sometimes a little competition helps, as it spurs development that might not happen in a pure monopoly.