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11 Years After Git, BitKeeper Is Open-Sourced (phoronix.com)

Posted by msmash on from the a-day-late-and-a-dollar-short dept.

An anonymous reader writes: Eleven years after Linus Torvalds developed Git after a falling out with BitKeeper for managing the Linux kernel source code, BitMover Inc has finally decided to open-source the BitKeeper VCS. The latest BitKeeper release has made the code open-source under the terms of the Apache 2.0 license. The community edition code is available from BitKeeper.org. Does BitKeeper now stand a chance against free software systems like Git and SVN?To offer some context, Larry McVoy, the CEO of BitMover -- the company that makes BitKeeper -- offered free BitKeeper licenses to various open source projects -- Linux kernel utilized it as well. However, later, Australian computer programmer Andrew Tridgell reverse engineered BitKeeper protocol in an attempt to make his own client. Torvalds didn't like this practice, and accused Tridgell of "playing dirty tricks with his proprietary source code tool of choice," and as a result, he wrote Git.

8 of 197 comments (clear)

  1. Too late by bool2 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    If BitKeeper had done that in the first place they'd still be relevant, possibly even the market leader.

    Do they stand a chance now? Not without some killer new features that can't trivially be copied and pasted into Git.

    1. Re:Too late by Bruce+Perens · · Score: 3, Insightful

      If BitKeeper had done that in the first place they'd still be relevant, possibly even the market leader.

      Maybe not immediately. The Internet was sort of in its infancy, at least compared to now, when all of this went down. But it's true that if Bitkeeper had been made Open Source then, there would probably be no Git or anything like it. Bitkeeper would be the dominant source-code control system today. Given the way that several companies seem to have made money on Git, Larry might have made that money.

      There are a lot of ifs though. We all have 20-20 hindsight but we can't really say that things would have worked out better for Larry. At the time he had a conventional software company and salaries to pay. It would have been difficult for him to get over the economic hump to where things are today.

      --
      Bruce Perens.
  2. Free as in money by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Insightful

    could never work. Free as in freedom is what matters. Stallman told us long ago. Torvalds needed to find out the hard way.

  3. a bold move... by Gravis+Zero · · Score: 3, Insightful

    11 years too late.

    --
    Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
  4. Too late by Artem+S.+Tashkinov · · Score: 1, Insightful

    The world has already moved on to Git which is essentially perfect nowadays.

  5. Re:Not Quite as Described by Bruce+Perens · · Score: 4, Insightful

    It remains a lesson regarding how not to work with Linus Torvalds.

    No. Linus would have been happy to continue to use Bitkeeper. What Linus did not understand was the developer community's commitment to Open Source and that they would rebel. I am sure he would have rather spent that time working on the kernel instead of making Git.

    --
    Bruce Perens.
  6. Re: Not Quite as Described by Bruce+Perens · · Score: 3, Insightful

    The HELP command has no other purpose than to give out exactly the information that Andrew received. To have that command and protest its use makes no sense.

    --
    Bruce Perens.
  7. Re:Not even upset by Bruce+Perens · · Score: 4, Insightful

    So, you, Linus, and Larry were annoyed with Tridge for doing exactly what he did to create Samba. He figured out the over-wire protocol without ever looking at the software of the server. But nobody seemed to object to his work on Samba. At the time, every big corporation was using it, and IBM, Apple, and HP were building it into products. Maybe they still are.

    --
    Bruce Perens.