Re: Linux kernel Bitkeeper mess (OT)

At some point the SCM vendor (decided|was forced) to declare he would no longer provide the system for free.

You left out an important (to me) fact here: This was triggered because a member of Linus' team that was gung-ho "everything in the world should be open-source" guy wrote a reverse-engineering of the data format for BitKeeper, violating the agreement Linus had with Larry, even over Linus' persistent and deliberate advice to the contrary.

So, part of the story is "even if you're an open-source zealot, follow the rules!"

On the other hand, from lemons came lemonade. I'm strongly considering using Git on projects because of its nice distributed creativity model. (No, I can't seem to get SVK to work on my machines, and the rest of the stuff looks even further down the scale. Git compiles and installs trivially, except for the documentation stuff.)

-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker
Be sure to read my standard disclaimer if this is a reply.

update: yes, sorry, I misheard the story. Not a "member of his team", but perhaps someone who should have understood the consequences of his act.

Comment on Re: Linux kernel Bitkeeper mess (OT)

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Re^2: Linux kernel Bitkeeper mess (OT) by szbalint (Friar) on Nov 04, 2005 at 09:12 UTC
Actually, that might not be entirely accurate, as it was Tridge, Samba author, who reverse engineered the data format of BitKeeper for interoperability. He never agreed to the BitKeeper license in the first place. Calling him a member of Linus' team is a bit of a strech, because by that measure thousands are members of that team. I certainly don't believe that everything in the world should be open source, but imo most formats are an exception.	[reply]
Re^2: Linux kernel Bitkeeper mess (OT) by tirwhan (Abbot) on Nov 04, 2005 at 09:36 UTC
This wasn't a member of Linus's "team", but Andrew Trigell, the creator of Samba and rsync (who is also currently employed by OSDL, as is Linus, but AFAIK they don't actually work together). That's why I put the "\|" between "decided" and "was forced". IMO it is debatable how wrong it was of Tridge to try and access the BK data without going through the BK format. After all, the approach he used was exactly the same he used for creating Samba, and not too many people call him an unreasonable open-source zealot for that. There was no disassembly or illegal looking at forbidden data going on here, he was simply trying out stuff with telnet. Should reverse-engineering a network protocol be considered wrong? I don't think you'd get any court conviction on that and neither do I think it's morally wrong. The Bitkeeper "free" license at the time also contained a number of questionable clauses, like basically forbidding anybody who used BK to even think about working on any other SCM. That's just ludicrous IMO. Regardless of that, Tridge wasn't bound by the license because he was not using BK in his reverse engineering, but I think it shows another example of what's wrong with Larry McVoy's mental model of the world. So I think the fiasco was caused more by McVoy's attitude`[1]` than by any actions of Tridge's. The issue isn't clear-cut however, hence the "or" sign :-). I tried to make my reply short`[2]` because it's OT to this forum, and therefore I necessarily left details out. The same thing that applies to tilly's comment also applies here though: exactly why the situation blew up is irrelevant to the danger closed formats represent. McVoy~~'s company could have gone out of business, or he~~ could have been ousted and the new board decided to stop giving free lunches to the open source hippies, and the result would have been exactly the same. `[1]` And before someone gets a wrong impression I'd also like to say that in contrast to this affair Larry McVoy has done more for free software than most people in the world (and certainly more than me), he's a fine software engineer and IMO noone should hold a grudge against him for all this. I just think he was wrong on a lot of points here and wish he had a good public-relations person to talk to before sending emails to some people. `[2]` Since there does seem to be some interest in a fair and/or more detailed account of the story I'd be happy to write it down more extensively, please /msg me if you feel this would be of value either on PM or off. Update:I've just realised that the stricken-out part is not true. Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it. -- Brian W. Kernighan	[reply] [d/l] [select]