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