Yes. Quantum mechanics should eventually get superceded by something else which accounts for physics under a much wider range of conditions. As you say, doesn't mean QM was wrong as such, just that there are more complete descriptions out there. And physicists are still looking.
But I'd be careful making an alchemy/astrology comparison... A key difference between alchemy/astrology and chemistry/astronomy is that the former are occult systems where metaphors are evaluated subjectively, and the latter are scientific fields where knowledge is shared freely and metaphors are tested by repeated and independent experiments.
Now, prior to the scientific revolution, they were the same thing.
What happened with the development of the scientific method was that even though they started in the same place, chemistry/astronomy rapidly differentiated itself because the most erroneous ideas didn't last long under empirical scrutiny. In response, alchemy/astrology necessarily rejected the idea of an objective reality that could be empirically tested.
So, it doesn't really matter whether a theory seems subjectively mystical or not (though that can be a warning sign). The important questions are "can it be tested?", "has it been tested?", and (as you very rightly point out) "is it the simplest theory?" (i.e. have the simpler theories been tested and failed?)
In the case of particle spin, it's been observed that, although much of the math is superficially similar to the angular momentum of a spinning sphere, particle spin is quantized.
Electrons, for example, have only been observed with two possible "spin" directions (called "up" and "down", though there's no reference to an absolute up and down), and no possible intermediate angles between them, which appears to hold true regardless of where they are observed from[1].
This (among other things) indicates that thinking of them them in terms of literal rotating spheres (which can have any spin orientation), while superficially simpler and more intuitive, isn't useful.
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[1] Check out the Stern-Gerlach experiment for one way to demonstrate this. If there were intermediate spin states, the electrons would fan out rather than exactly split into two neat streams.
Yeah, it makes me sad because although you don't seem to have much science background, you are actually asking scientifically-minded questions.:/
Although I don't think it's conscious, lot of people really do end up trying to treat scientific issues in religious terms. Witness BOTH sides of the creationism/evolution/etc flamefests.
Something to bear in mind is that when we talk about particle spin, "spin" is a metaphor. There isn't an actual rotation of a material object involved.
"spin" is just a label we've adopted for an abstract property of particles for which we don't have a good name otherwise. It becomes more obvious in e.g. quantum chromodynamics, where we use labels like "color" to describe particles.
Sadly, it's all too easy to mistake the map for the territory here.
In physics, even the notion of particles is a metaphor for stuff happening in specific places (at least when we're looking) and existing in discrete quantities, but taking the metaphor too far (e.g. reasoning as if they were actually tiny little solid spheres) eventually leads to conclusions that don't match what happens in the physical world.
And, that's what actually matters in the end. Not my assertions or those of the GP, but what experiments demonstrate about how the physical world behaves. The metaphors are just descriptive.
why is the cat both dead and alive? why can a bit be both one and zero? i don't understand this and would like to hear an explanation that makes sense.
While I'm not sure there is an explanation that makes intuitive sense, it does appear to be the way the universe works at small scales.
Schroedinger's thought experiment was intended to illustrate the weirdness of the issue by tying the state of a macroscopic object (a cat) to a quantum state (the decay/not decay of the particle), mainly. It's not a realistic experiment because you couldn't isolate the macroscopic contents of the box from the outside world sufficiently (and besides, it's cruel).
But, real experiments do demonstrate that quantum stuff consistently behaves in really bizzare and counterintuitive it-is-but-it-isn't ways.
One famous example is the oft-repeated "double slit" experiment (hopefully I won't mangle the summary too much).
You remember light-as-waves? If you take a coherent light source (i.e. a laser) and shine it onto a screen through a mask with two small parallel slits in it, you will see a pattern on the screen resulting from the two interfering wavefronts.
That's simple enough. But light is also particles (photons). You can put a filter between the lazer and the mask that only allows one photon at a time to dribble through. Now you have individual photons going through the mask, and you see individual spots as they hit the screen. Intuitive enough.
But it starts to get weird. If you measure the brightness of those spots, though, they still follow the brightness of the interference pattern. That would suggest that the photon is going through both slits at once and somehow interfering with itself. Hmm, that's not very intuitive.
But, okay. We can test that by using detectors at the slits to note the photons as they go by. Hmm. No, each photon is only going through one slit or the other, not both at once. So why are we getting the interference pattern? Wait, where did the interference pattern go?
Huh. We stop observing which slit the photon is going through, and the interference pattern comes back (i.e. it effectively went through both slots). We start observing again, and it starts "picking" one or the other slot again...
Basically it looks as if, to employ a gross anthoropomorphism, on quantum scales the universe is "lazy", and only commits to a specific choice if it has to (because somebody is watching). No, that's not intuitive, and no, we have no clue how this happens exactly (although we're getting better at describing it and exploiting it for practical purposes like primitive quantum computers), but that's what happens.
why does it need an "observer"? what exactly is an observer"?
Physicists are wrestling with that one. We don't really know. A person directly observing the quality being tested (directly or via instrumentation) seems to be sufficient, but not necessary.
That's one of the downsides of the "Copenhagen Interpretation", which is the most common interpretation of these phenomena -- that an observer observing "forces" the universe to make a "choice" (the grossly anthropomorphic word choice is mine though -- the actual way of putting it is that the act of observation "collapses the wave function").
There are other interpretations, too, that don't require a privileged position of "observer", but they have other very awkward quirks.
this all seems counterintuitive to normal logic so why should i believe it is true?
Certainly you shouldn't accept it just because someone says so, or because a few experiments suggest it might be true. In this case, though, the experiments have been repeated too many times by too many different people for the weird results to be the result of experimental error though, and also experiments designed to disprove these behaviors have fai
The way BK handled it was indirect -- upgrades were made mandatory, and the upgrade was made available under the most recent "enhanced" version of the license.
Do you think Microsoft would let one of their contractors work on Samba, even if their desk job had nothing to do with CIFS?
Do you think Microsoft would fire one of their contractors for working on a project on his own time, at the demand of one of their suppliers? Would the supplier have a legal (rather than informal) basis to make such a demand (bearing in mind that contractors are not, legally, the same thing as full employees)? If not, wouldn't it depend upon Microsoft's relationship with the supplier?
I'm not going to argue that BitMover didn't have the right to pull the license, though.
If Linus et al didn't add some kind of graceful closesure clause, there's not too much leway to complain. Beware of Greeks bearing gifts - there's little that's free in the commercial world. They knew what they were getting into and decided it was still worth it.
"They?" No, most of the developers didn't consider it worth it. Linus went ahead anyway.
If people really had that big of a problem with BK, they were free to fork the kernel. Did anyone [notable] do so?
It was brewing. I've been involved with a number of forks, and actually led the Sodipodi->Inkscape fork. Attitdues and events were becoming eerily familiar. Forks aren't instantaneous things: people have to get above a certain anger/pain threshold, you need a leader or leaders to emerge who can build sufficient consensus, and they need time to do so.
The bigger the project, the longer this will take because the pain thresholds, social pressures, and leadership demands are higher. Even though developers were already very unhappy, it took me at least 9 months of social effort to fork Sodipodi, before I even did anything like registering a domain or actually forking the code. And that's for a (comparatively) small project.
A fork which took a much longer time to manifest because of its scale was the XFree86->X.Org fork. That lurked below the surface for a long time (several years at least) before things came to a head and there was a public fork.
If the BK issue hadn't been rendered moot by Larry's decision to pull it, I would have expected the first serious attempts at a public fork within the next year. As it is, Linus has already spent a lot of his leadership capital; fortunately he had a lot to spend.
It's called basic contract law. A customer violates your contract, you take steps against them.
Ok.
So... what's it called when a non-customer (who you have no legal relationship with) does something you don't like -- and you retaliate by making threats, calling their employer and trying to get them fired, and then taking action against your own customers?
I don't think there'd be much of a problem here had Larry McVoy confined himself to working within contract law.
The situation came about because of a special arrangement that was made with Linus
...and the nature of that special arrangement was ethically problematic, IMO, on both sides.
I think that's a bit unfair. I've been following his evaluation of what was out there, and git really was the best choice, I think.
And it's not as if the other tools aren't benefiting. git is something new, providing a virtual versioned filesystem in a way that no other SCM (BitKeeper included) has. Arch and Darcs at least are looking into using git as a backend now.
In most modern unices executing shell scripts is a function of the kernel rather than the shell interpreter. So looking at the open-source shell interpreters won't tell you anything.
(...and back when executing shell scripts _was_ a function of the shell interpreter, setuid/setgid wasn't generally possible to support for shell scripts)
I do know from experience that HP-UX still permits setuid/setgid shell scripts, at least up through 11i, and probably later.
Metadata is, by it's very nature, data about data. This might include things like checkin comments or changeset information. Both of which should also appear in either the code comments, or as part of a patchset.
My understanding was that it included relationships recorded in the revision history that didn't map well to the CVS (RCS, really) model, and weren't exposed by the CVS gateway in the comment fields either. But I don't have sufficient knowledge of BK's model to evaluate Andrew's claim.
In any event, a tool existed, as you mention, to do this. All he needed to do was ask someone who had agreed to the license to export the necessary information for him.
I get the impression he wanted to work with the information on an ongoing basis, rather than get one-off manual snapshots. I'm not sure Larry would have consented to a licensee setting up any kind of automated export process that he didn't control. But I don't know, as I wasn't privy to the exchange between Andrew and Larry.
Realize that I am speculating about what Andrew wanted to do, beyond document the on-disk and wire formats used by BK to get at data which he had legal rights to, but which would otherwise require a BK license to access.
I'm not so sure I understand your argument about Larry restricting competition. All he was doing was saying "I'm not going to give you, for zero cost, the ability to reverse engineer my solution".
How high does a non-zero cost has to be to count as a restriction? In his famous "coat tails" comment, Larry did put it in those terms himself -- compete if you want, but only under specific conditions set by him (among them, no reverse engineering).
You base them all on the supposition that Larry was taking advantage of a situation. Both sides got something out of it.
Linus got something out of it. Larry got something out of it.
However, I'm uncomfortable with Larry also extracting the price from people who were not part of the deal, and were on record as regarding that price to be too high. Particularly when using a "good samaritan" deal as leverage to do so.
If Linus is such a fool, should he really be in charge? It seems to me that those who feel him incompetent should do something about that, like creating a governing body (like, say, the Apache Foundation has) and, if necessary, forking.
If he continued to make arrangements like this, absolutely. So far this BitKeeper thing was a one-off thing though.
I have a high enough esteem for him that I've not given up on him totally yet (as if my opinion alone mattered ^_-).
I note, though, that he had no problem exporting a copy of the kernel tree for Linus, which suggests that he's not quite the grasping, power-mad monster you seem to think him.
Yeah, I was a bit unfair to him. If you follow my posting history I've moderated my opinion a little as I've written and thought about this.
The license setup he created was still an unwarranted power grab, though.
Here you're just putting words in Linus's mouth. He said no such thing.
If the argument he outlined in that one post was applied consistently, that would be the effect. Of course you are likely right; I doubt he means it that way. But I don't get the sense he's thought through the implications fully.
Those that didn't want to agree to the terms could get access to the code via other (Free) ways.
There was no free tool to access the portions of the revision metadata that Tridge wanted (the CVS gateway exported a lot, but not everything).
Larry and Linus _did_ offer him the means to export that data in a neutral format... but only by accepting the license and using the non-free BK tool. (Linus had written some scripts that used bk to do the export, and Larry had offered to make it a standard feature)
I can understand why Andrew might not be satisfied with that alternative.
In the next bit I'm going to ask some questions. I don't have good answers for all of them.
What is wrong with common courtesy? Respecting your collegues decisions?
It would have been one thing if the agreement Linus made with Larry had simply been that no user who consented to use the free BitKeeper would be allowed to reverse-engineer the repository format/protocol. Then it would simply have been a question of people being free to trade their legal right to reverse-engineering in exchange for using BK if they so chose. That condition may or may not be legal, but it does seem fair.
However, what Larry asked was that nobody in the world reverse-engineer BitKeeper, whether or not they agreed to his terms. Obviously that can't be enforced by law, but once kernel development had become dependent on BitKeeper, the demand could be backed by a threat to withdraw it.
I don't know what Larry was thinking. I do think whatever else, he really did mean to be helpful by providing BK, and Linus really did need help. But whatever his motivations, Larry also took advantage of an opportunity to restrict competition in a way that he would not normally have had open to him under the law.
Was it ethical for Larry to take advantage of his newfound position to manipulate others for personal gain? Does it change things that we "owe him one"?
Many of the developers saw this coming, and had publically declared a decision in not to accept that tradeoff in advance. Linus did not respect that decision by his colleagues; he was too desperate for a quick solution. Was it ethical for Linus to enter into this specific kind of agreement (which would affect them pretty directly) over their objections?
Of course, just because someone is inconsiderate doesn't mean one has an ethical right to respond in kind. However, there are other factors involved.
Metaphor. In effect, Larry had said that in exchange for providing life support for the injured penguin, we must obey him, or he'll take it away again. Andrew and others (he wasn't the only one reverse-engineering) stubbornly refused, Larry followed through on his threat, and now the penguin's been unceremoniously dumped bleeding on the floor.
The question here is whether it was ethical of them to do this, knowing that Larry would hurt Linux development in response?
Let's step back a moment and consider a situation with higher stakes: many governments, as a matter of policy, refuse to accept the demands of hostage-takers, even when people's lives are in danger. Why do they do that? Is that ethical? Why or why not?
Now, rhetorical question: does Linux development carry more or less ethical weight than human life?
How would that difference affect the earlier "hostage-takers" analysis? Would that make the sort of action taken by the reverse-engineering developers more or less ethical?
For the sake of the metaphor, is it important that the damage to Linux isn't "fatal"? Does it make a difference that many core developers had not agreed to Larry's intervention?
Personally, based on my own answers, I'd have some reservations about simply branding Andrew an unethical jerk.
Was it ethical for Linus to get free BK licenses by promising Larry that Tridge (and others) would abide by Larry's terms, after they had publically said they would not?
Remember, those folks refused to use BK, so they were never bound by the license. I guess maybe Linus thought he could continue to soft-talk everyone out of continuing their reverse-engineering efforts, but eventually he failed.
Probably Larry attempting to force Tridge to stop by interfering with his contract employment didn't help matters.
Well, Larry might be a jerk, but he's not pulling the BK trees, and he has already provided a read-only open source (BSD) client. As for the reverse-engineering itself, though...
But in this case, doing so was not generally ethical, since the software had been provided under the condition that it not be reverse engineered.
Question: was it ethical for Linus to agree to that condition on behalf of everyone, after many kernel developers had explicitly stated they were unwilling to agree to it?
In essence Linus made a promise to Larry (nobody will reverse-engineer the BK protocol) that he couldn't keep.
That combined with Larry's manipulative behavior pretty much made the current meltdown inevitable.
Please at least realize that my issue is not whether Tridgell had the "right" to reverse-engineer, its whether Tridgell has the "right" to compel policy upon a community because he can unilaterally act to create the result, against the wishes of the community's defacto leader. My answer is that if he acts on behalf of the community, the community can decide not to use the product. When he takes independent action to compel a result upon the community, he is being a megalomaniacal asshole.
We have a heterogenous community, some of which are willing accept an agreement, the majority of which don't. The de-facto leader accepts the agreement.
The agreement would apply to the community as a whole. Who takes precedence?
I think that depends on the nature and breadth of the leader's authority (i.e. had the leader been given the authority by the community to make this kind of agreement on their behalf -- hence my Locke reference). Probably that is near the root of our disagreement. Unfortunately there is no Linux Constitution to lay these things out.
I'm not entirely convinced I'm right at this point. I do at least understand the argument that the right thing to do would have been to either leave or depose the leader.
then he could merely had the community refuse to use the tool.
Huh? Most of them did refuse...
The only expectation was that participants in in kernel development abide to the SPIRIT of the agreement, which was NOT TO REVERSE ENGINEER the product.
Way back in the beginning, a number of prominent kernel developers publically refused to accept an agreement with Larry (IIRC Tridge was one). It's not like they were quiet about it. Why do you believe they should be held to it now?
If Larry is giving a license to use HIS product and provide support for it, he also has the right to retract that offer.
I agree.
I don't believe Larry should ever be forced to continue providing BK against his will, however arbitrary his reasons might be.
I just didn't appreciate his attempt to manipulate people who were not parties to an agreement with him.
I guess the right thing to do is not to accept the conditions, and understand that Larry won't provide BK in that case. OK.
I don't care what were Tridgell's intentions. Its no different that arguing what was GWB's intentions toward Iraq. I can only judge him based upon his statements and actions. I don't even care if he's a good guy or a bad guy. I only care about the consequences.
That is a principle I do strongly agree with. Maybe I have a naive understanding of the consequences?
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Yes. Quantum mechanics should eventually get superceded by something else which accounts for physics under a much wider range of conditions. As you say, doesn't mean QM was wrong as such, just that there are more complete descriptions out there. And physicists are still looking.
But I'd be careful making an alchemy/astrology comparison... A key difference between alchemy/astrology and chemistry/astronomy is that the former are occult systems where metaphors are evaluated subjectively, and the latter are scientific fields where knowledge is shared freely and metaphors are tested by repeated and independent experiments.
Now, prior to the scientific revolution, they were the same thing.
What happened with the development of the scientific method was that even though they started in the same place, chemistry/astronomy rapidly differentiated itself because the most erroneous ideas didn't last long under empirical scrutiny. In response, alchemy/astrology necessarily rejected the idea of an objective reality that could be empirically tested.
So, it doesn't really matter whether a theory seems subjectively mystical or not (though that can be a warning sign). The important questions are "can it be tested?", "has it been tested?", and (as you very rightly point out) "is it the simplest theory?" (i.e. have the simpler theories been tested and failed?)
In the case of particle spin, it's been observed that, although much of the math is superficially similar to the angular momentum of a spinning sphere, particle spin is quantized.
Electrons, for example, have only been observed with two possible "spin" directions (called "up" and "down", though there's no reference to an absolute up and down), and no possible intermediate angles between them, which appears to hold true regardless of where they are observed from[1].
This (among other things) indicates that thinking of them them in terms of literal rotating spheres (which can have any spin orientation), while superficially simpler and more intuitive, isn't useful.
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[1] Check out the Stern-Gerlach experiment for one way to demonstrate this. If there were intermediate spin states, the electrons would fan out rather than exactly split into two neat streams.
Heh, seriously. I guess it's what we're used to though.
Yeah, it makes me sad because although you don't seem to have much science background, you are actually asking scientifically-minded questions. :/
Although I don't think it's conscious, lot of people really do end up trying to treat scientific issues in religious terms. Witness BOTH sides of the creationism/evolution/etc flamefests.
Something to bear in mind is that when we talk about particle spin, "spin" is a metaphor. There isn't an actual rotation of a material object involved.
"spin" is just a label we've adopted for an abstract property of particles for which we don't have a good name otherwise. It becomes more obvious in e.g. quantum chromodynamics, where we use labels like "color" to describe particles.
Sadly, it's all too easy to mistake the map for the territory here.
In physics, even the notion of particles is a metaphor for stuff happening in specific places (at least when we're looking) and existing in discrete quantities, but taking the metaphor too far (e.g. reasoning as if they were actually tiny little solid spheres) eventually leads to conclusions that don't match what happens in the physical world.
And, that's what actually matters in the end. Not my assertions or those of the GP, but what experiments demonstrate about how the physical world behaves. The metaphors are just descriptive.
While I'm not sure there is an explanation that makes intuitive sense, it does appear to be the way the universe works at small scales.
Schroedinger's thought experiment was intended to illustrate the weirdness of the issue by tying the state of a macroscopic object (a cat) to a quantum state (the decay/not decay of the particle), mainly. It's not a realistic experiment because you couldn't isolate the macroscopic contents of the box from the outside world sufficiently (and besides, it's cruel).
But, real experiments do demonstrate that quantum stuff consistently behaves in really bizzare and counterintuitive it-is-but-it-isn't ways.
One famous example is the oft-repeated "double slit" experiment (hopefully I won't mangle the summary too much).
You remember light-as-waves? If you take a coherent light source (i.e. a laser) and shine it onto a screen through a mask with two small parallel slits in it, you will see a pattern on the screen resulting from the two interfering wavefronts.
That's simple enough. But light is also particles (photons). You can put a filter between the lazer and the mask that only allows one photon at a time to dribble through. Now you have individual photons going through the mask, and you see individual spots as they hit the screen. Intuitive enough.
But it starts to get weird. If you measure the brightness of those spots, though, they still follow the brightness of the interference pattern. That would suggest that the photon is going through both slits at once and somehow interfering with itself. Hmm, that's not very intuitive.
But, okay. We can test that by using detectors at the slits to note the photons as they go by. Hmm. No, each photon is only going through one slit or the other, not both at once. So why are we getting the interference pattern? Wait, where did the interference pattern go?
Huh. We stop observing which slit the photon is going through, and the interference pattern comes back (i.e. it effectively went through both slots). We start observing again, and it starts "picking" one or the other slot again...
Basically it looks as if, to employ a gross anthoropomorphism, on quantum scales the universe is "lazy", and only commits to a specific choice if it has to (because somebody is watching). No, that's not intuitive, and no, we have no clue how this happens exactly (although we're getting better at describing it and exploiting it for practical purposes like primitive quantum computers), but that's what happens.
Physicists are wrestling with that one. We don't really know. A person directly observing the quality being tested (directly or via instrumentation) seems to be sufficient, but not necessary.
That's one of the downsides of the "Copenhagen Interpretation", which is the most common interpretation of these phenomena -- that an observer observing "forces" the universe to make a "choice" (the grossly anthropomorphic word choice is mine though -- the actual way of putting it is that the act of observation "collapses the wave function").
There are other interpretations, too, that don't require a privileged position of "observer", but they have other very awkward quirks.
Certainly you shouldn't accept it just because someone says so, or because a few experiments suggest it might be true. In this case, though, the experiments have been repeated too many times by too many different people for the weird results to be the result of experimental error though, and also experiments designed to disprove these behaviors have fai
The way BK handled it was indirect -- upgrades were made mandatory, and the upgrade was made available under the most recent "enhanced" version of the license.
Do you think Microsoft would fire one of their contractors for working on a project on his own time, at the demand of one of their suppliers? Would the supplier have a legal (rather than informal) basis to make such a demand (bearing in mind that contractors are not, legally, the same thing as full employees)? If not, wouldn't it depend upon Microsoft's relationship with the supplier?
I'm not going to argue that BitMover didn't have the right to pull the license, though.
"They?" No, most of the developers didn't consider it worth it. Linus went ahead anyway.
It was brewing. I've been involved with a number of forks, and actually led the Sodipodi->Inkscape fork. Attitdues and events were becoming eerily familiar. Forks aren't instantaneous things: people have to get above a certain anger/pain threshold, you need a leader or leaders to emerge who can build sufficient consensus, and they need time to do so.
The bigger the project, the longer this will take because the pain thresholds, social pressures, and leadership demands are higher. Even though developers were already very unhappy, it took me at least 9 months of social effort to fork Sodipodi, before I even did anything like registering a domain or actually forking the code. And that's for a (comparatively) small project.
A fork which took a much longer time to manifest because of its scale was the XFree86->X.Org fork. That lurked below the surface for a long time (several years at least) before things came to a head and there was a public fork.
If the BK issue hadn't been rendered moot by Larry's decision to pull it, I would have expected the first serious attempts at a public fork within the next year. As it is, Linus has already spent a lot of his leadership capital; fortunately he had a lot to spend.
Ok.
So... what's it called when a non-customer (who you have no legal relationship with) does something you don't like -- and you retaliate by making threats, calling their employer and trying to get them fired, and then taking action against your own customers?
I don't think there'd be much of a problem here had Larry McVoy confined himself to working within contract law.
...and the nature of that special arrangement was ethically problematic, IMO, on both sides.
I think that's a bit unfair. I've been following his evaluation of what was out there, and git really was the best choice, I think.
And it's not as if the other tools aren't benefiting. git is something new, providing a virtual versioned filesystem in a way that no other SCM (BitKeeper included) has. Arch and Darcs at least are looking into using git as a backend now.
The comparison is perfect!
In most modern unices executing shell scripts is a function of the kernel rather than the shell interpreter. So looking at the open-source shell interpreters won't tell you anything.
(...and back when executing shell scripts _was_ a function of the shell interpreter, setuid/setgid wasn't generally possible to support for shell scripts)
I do know from experience that HP-UX still permits setuid/setgid shell scripts, at least up through 11i, and probably later.
You can set up scripts in sudoers using NOPASSWD: for batch purposes.
My understanding was that it included relationships recorded in the revision history that didn't map well to the CVS (RCS, really) model, and weren't exposed by the CVS gateway in the comment fields either. But I don't have sufficient knowledge of BK's model to evaluate Andrew's claim.
I get the impression he wanted to work with the information on an ongoing basis, rather than get one-off manual snapshots. I'm not sure Larry would have consented to a licensee setting up any kind of automated export process that he didn't control. But I don't know, as I wasn't privy to the exchange between Andrew and Larry.
Realize that I am speculating about what Andrew wanted to do, beyond document the on-disk and wire formats used by BK to get at data which he had legal rights to, but which would otherwise require a BK license to access.
How high does a non-zero cost has to be to count as a restriction? In his famous "coat tails" comment, Larry did put it in those terms himself -- compete if you want, but only under specific conditions set by him (among them, no reverse engineering).
Linus got something out of it. Larry got something out of it.
However, I'm uncomfortable with Larry also extracting the price from people who were not part of the deal, and were on record as regarding that price to be too high. Particularly when using a "good samaritan" deal as leverage to do so.
If he continued to make arrangements like this, absolutely. So far this BitKeeper thing was a one-off thing though.
I have a high enough esteem for him that I've not given up on him totally yet (as if my opinion alone mattered ^_-).
Yeah, I was a bit unfair to him. If you follow my posting history I've moderated my opinion a little as I've written and thought about this.
The license setup he created was still an unwarranted power grab, though.
If the argument he outlined in that one post was applied consistently, that would be the effect. Of course you are likely right; I doubt he means it that way. But I don't get the sense he's thought through the implications fully.
There was no free tool to access the portions of the revision metadata that Tridge wanted (the CVS gateway exported a lot, but not everything).
Larry and Linus _did_ offer him the means to export that data in a neutral format ... but only by accepting the license and using the non-free BK tool. (Linus had written some scripts that used bk to do the export, and Larry had offered to make it a standard feature)
I can understand why Andrew might not be satisfied with that alternative.
In the next bit I'm going to ask some questions. I don't have good answers for all of them.
It would have been one thing if the agreement Linus made with Larry had simply been that no user who consented to use the free BitKeeper would be allowed to reverse-engineer the repository format/protocol. Then it would simply have been a question of people being free to trade their legal right to reverse-engineering in exchange for using BK if they so chose. That condition may or may not be legal, but it does seem fair.
However, what Larry asked was that nobody in the world reverse-engineer BitKeeper, whether or not they agreed to his terms. Obviously that can't be enforced by law, but once kernel development had become dependent on BitKeeper, the demand could be backed by a threat to withdraw it.
I don't know what Larry was thinking. I do think whatever else, he really did mean to be helpful by providing BK, and Linus really did need help. But whatever his motivations, Larry also took advantage of an opportunity to restrict competition in a way that he would not normally have had open to him under the law.
Was it ethical for Larry to take advantage of his newfound position to manipulate others for personal gain? Does it change things that we "owe him one"?
Many of the developers saw this coming, and had publically declared a decision in not to accept that tradeoff in advance. Linus did not respect that decision by his colleagues; he was too desperate for a quick solution. Was it ethical for Linus to enter into this specific kind of agreement (which would affect them pretty directly) over their objections?
Of course, just because someone is inconsiderate doesn't mean one has an ethical right to respond in kind. However, there are other factors involved.
Metaphor. In effect, Larry had said that in exchange for providing life support for the injured penguin, we must obey him, or he'll take it away again. Andrew and others (he wasn't the only one reverse-engineering) stubbornly refused, Larry followed through on his threat, and now the penguin's been unceremoniously dumped bleeding on the floor.
The question here is whether it was ethical of them to do this, knowing that Larry would hurt Linux development in response?
Let's step back a moment and consider a situation with higher stakes: many governments, as a matter of policy, refuse to accept the demands of hostage-takers, even when people's lives are in danger. Why do they do that? Is that ethical? Why or why not?
Now, rhetorical question: does Linux development carry more or less ethical weight than human life?
How would that difference affect the earlier "hostage-takers" analysis? Would that make the sort of action taken by the reverse-engineering developers more or less ethical?
For the sake of the metaphor, is it important that the damage to Linux isn't "fatal"? Does it make a difference that many core developers had not agreed to Larry's intervention?
Personally, based on my own answers, I'd have some reservations about simply branding Andrew an unethical jerk.
Nope, Andrew's an OSDL contractor, not an employee, and he was doing this on his own time. No license violation there.
Sadly, it's not a new trend. Ever read Orwell's famous essay on the topic? Published 1946.
IIRC, I read that something like 90% of the work in the software industry is in-house and contract work, rather than software for distribution.
Maybe just don't start a software company that sells software instead of programming labor (i.e. contracting).
Was it ethical for Linus to get free BK licenses by promising Larry that Tridge (and others) would abide by Larry's terms, after they had publically said they would not?
Remember, those folks refused to use BK, so they were never bound by the license. I guess maybe Linus thought he could continue to soft-talk everyone out of continuing their reverse-engineering efforts, but eventually he failed.
Probably Larry attempting to force Tridge to stop by interfering with his contract employment didn't help matters.
Yeah, that's considered very, very bad practice in journalism.
The reason being that the "we just made that up" tends to get missed by casual readers. Witness the Slashdot article.
Yes, it makes the point, but I don't think that justifies the yellow journalism.
Well, Larry might be a jerk, but he's not pulling the BK trees, and he has already provided a read-only open source (BSD) client. As for the reverse-engineering itself, though...
Question: was it ethical for Linus to agree to that condition on behalf of everyone, after many kernel developers had explicitly stated they were unwilling to agree to it?
In essence Linus made a promise to Larry (nobody will reverse-engineer the BK protocol) that he couldn't keep.
That combined with Larry's manipulative behavior pretty much made the current meltdown inevitable.
We have a heterogenous community, some of which are willing accept an agreement, the majority of which don't. The de-facto leader accepts the agreement.
The agreement would apply to the community as a whole. Who takes precedence?
I think that depends on the nature and breadth of the leader's authority (i.e. had the leader been given the authority by the community to make this kind of agreement on their behalf -- hence my Locke reference). Probably that is near the root of our disagreement. Unfortunately there is no Linux Constitution to lay these things out.
I'm not entirely convinced I'm right at this point. I do at least understand the argument that the right thing to do would have been to either leave or depose the leader.
Huh? Most of them did refuse...
Way back in the beginning, a number of prominent kernel developers publically refused to accept an agreement with Larry (IIRC Tridge was one). It's not like they were quiet about it. Why do you believe they should be held to it now?
I agree.
I don't believe Larry should ever be forced to continue providing BK against his will, however arbitrary his reasons might be.
I just didn't appreciate his attempt to manipulate people who were not parties to an agreement with him.
I guess the right thing to do is not to accept the conditions, and understand that Larry won't provide BK in that case. OK.
That is a principle I do strongly agree with. Maybe I have a naive understanding of the consequences?