*I'm* the one who has to fix my friends' and relatives' spyware- and virus-infested computers. *I'm* the one who has to hand-hold them through backing up their files, reinstalling Windows and reinstalling all their software. *I'm* the one who gets the late-night phonecalls - "Please can you help me, something's gone wrong with my computer and I have an assignment due tomorrow." *I'm* the one who helps them to install a personal firewall, and teaches them not to just click "OK" without reading on the little red messages that pop up.
Understand, I'm not unwilling to help people with their computer problems. But I know that *their* computing experience would be less stressful if they'd just use Linux/Firefox/Thunderbird; and my life would be a little easier.
you want to explain that it's 'ok' because it's just 'one' bad apple to all the bitkeep programmers who have families thay have to feed
Yeah right. Just because this one guy has started a pre-alpha project to reverse-engineer BK, suddenly BitMover is going to go out of business and all its programmers are going to lose their jobs. Like hell that's going to happen. Just like that, all the companies that use BK are suddenly going to switch to some unproven, unsupported open-source replacement. I don't think so, somehow.
I grant you that, if the developer agreed to the BK license agreement, he broke his word if he tried to reverse-engineer it. He shouldn't have done that, he should have stopped using BK instead. Fair enough. However, a license agreement which has forced at least one kernel developer to stop working on CVS development, is an immoral license agreement. It's not as if CVS is in any way a competitor to BK.
What bitkeeper did is take the only steps left available to them after repeatedly being ignored by the community and their employers, in order to save the jobs of their employees.
See above. Also, how is the community supposed to stop this guy from RE'ing BK? "Oooh! If you don't stop doing that we'll... be really nasty to you and say you can't be part of the open-source community any more." Wow! Scary! And what can OSDL do? AFAIK, your employer can't tell you what to do with your free time (although in the USA, you never know). Unless there is some generic clause in his employment contract that they could use to fire him, there is nothing they could do without being open to a wrongful-dismissal lawsuit.
The open source community, in contrary to the licence agreement, tried to steal that IP and put bitkeeper out of business.
"The open source community"? One developer, who happened to be employed by OSDL on a completely unrelated project. How is that a failure of the whole community? You seem to have this strange understanding of the community as a single amorphous body, which acts as one being. "They accepted bitkeeper" - well, no actually. The primary Linux kernel developers accepted it; many members of the community disagreed with that decision. Even so, it was only one person who broke the license agreement; the vast majority of the developers didn't do anything wrong.
And what IP did he try to "steal"? The code? No. BitMover's patented technology? No. All that he did was try to reverse-engineer the BK protocols. IANAL, but AFAIK reverse-engineering for the purpose of interoperability is explicitly permitted in most jurisdictions (don't know about the US with stupid DMCA, though). Anyway, it's certainly not stealing, even if it is a violation of the license agreement.
What BitMover did is like if the Linux developers said "Some for-profit companies violated the GPL on Linux code; so we're going to change the license on Linux so that no commercial companies can ever use Linux, even if they had nothing to do with the GPL violations."
--
Linux® is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds in the USA and other countries.;)
For heaven's sake, it's organised by the ACM, a *US-based* organisation with members from all over the world. Shanghai Jiao Tong only *hosts* it, they aren't in charge of the actual contest. As for giving "a bunch of medals to more communists", well, Moscow and St Petersburg are in Russia, which got rid of communism in 1991. You never know about those Canadians, though - bunch of commies, the lot of 'em!;-) Is it really so difficult for some people to accept that the USA is not the best at *everything*?
Disclaimer: I am a CS student at the University of Cape Town, South Africa - the university whose team won the Africa & Middle East regional competition. W00t Ikey Tigers!
I mean, the BSD projects keep their *entire* system - kernel + userland + ports framework - in CVS repositories, and this seems to have worked very well for them. Is there something fundamentally different about the Linux development philosopy, or in the way that Linus works, that would make CVS unsuitable?
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*I'm* the one who has to fix my friends' and relatives' spyware- and virus-infested computers. *I'm* the one who has to hand-hold them through backing up their files, reinstalling Windows and reinstalling all their software. *I'm* the one who gets the late-night phonecalls - "Please can you help me, something's gone wrong with my computer and I have an assignment due tomorrow." *I'm* the one who helps them to install a personal firewall, and teaches them not to just click "OK" without reading on the little red messages that pop up.
Understand, I'm not unwilling to help people with their computer problems. But I know that *their* computing experience would be less stressful if they'd just use Linux/Firefox/Thunderbird; and my life would be a little easier.
Yeah right. Just because this one guy has started a pre-alpha project to reverse-engineer BK, suddenly BitMover is going to go out of business and all its programmers are going to lose their jobs. Like hell that's going to happen. Just like that, all the companies that use BK are suddenly going to switch to some unproven, unsupported open-source replacement. I don't think so, somehow.
I grant you that, if the developer agreed to the BK license agreement, he broke his word if he tried to reverse-engineer it. He shouldn't have done that, he should have stopped using BK instead. Fair enough. However, a license agreement which has forced at least one kernel developer to stop working on CVS development, is an immoral license agreement. It's not as if CVS is in any way a competitor to BK.
See above. Also, how is the community supposed to stop this guy from RE'ing BK? "Oooh! If you don't stop doing that we'll... be really nasty to you and say you can't be part of the open-source community any more." Wow! Scary! And what can OSDL do? AFAIK, your employer can't tell you what to do with your free time (although in the USA, you never know). Unless there is some generic clause in his employment contract that they could use to fire him, there is nothing they could do without being open to a wrongful-dismissal lawsuit.
"The open source community"? One developer, who happened to be employed by OSDL on a completely unrelated project. How is that a failure of the whole community? You seem to have this strange understanding of the community as a single amorphous body, which acts as one being. "They accepted bitkeeper" - well, no actually. The primary Linux kernel developers accepted it; many members of the community disagreed with that decision. Even so, it was only one person who broke the license agreement; the vast majority of the developers didn't do anything wrong.
And what IP did he try to "steal"? The code? No. BitMover's patented technology? No. All that he did was try to reverse-engineer the BK protocols. IANAL, but AFAIK reverse-engineering for the purpose of interoperability is explicitly permitted in most jurisdictions (don't know about the US with stupid DMCA, though). Anyway, it's certainly not stealing, even if it is a violation of the license agreement.
What BitMover did is like if the Linux developers said "Some for-profit companies violated the GPL on Linux code; so we're going to change the license on Linux so that no commercial companies can ever use Linux, even if they had nothing to do with the GPL violations."
-- ;)
Linux® is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds in the USA and other countries.
For heaven's sake, it's organised by the ACM, a *US-based* organisation with members from all over the world. Shanghai Jiao Tong only *hosts* it, they aren't in charge of the actual contest. As for giving "a bunch of medals to more communists", well, Moscow and St Petersburg are in Russia, which got rid of communism in 1991. You never know about those Canadians, though - bunch of commies, the lot of 'em! ;-) Is it really so difficult for some people to accept that the USA is not the best at *everything*?
Disclaimer: I am a CS student at the University of Cape Town, South Africa - the university whose team won the Africa & Middle East regional competition. W00t Ikey Tigers!
I mean, the BSD projects keep their *entire* system - kernel + userland + ports framework - in CVS repositories, and this seems to have worked very well for them. Is there something fundamentally different about the Linux development philosopy, or in the way that Linus works, that would make CVS unsuitable?