decoration decoration
Stories

GROKLAW
When you want to know more...
decoration
For layout only
Home
Archives
Site Map
Search
About Groklaw
Awards
Legal Research
Timelines
ApplevSamsung
ApplevSamsung p.2
ArchiveExplorer
Autozone
Bilski
Cases
Cast: Lawyers
Comes v. MS
Contracts/Documents
Courts
DRM
Gordon v MS
GPL
Grokdoc
HTML How To
IPI v RH
IV v. Google
Legal Docs
Lodsys
MS Litigations
MSvB&N
News Picks
Novell v. MS
Novell-MS Deal
ODF/OOXML
OOXML Appeals
OraclevGoogle
Patents
ProjectMonterey
Psystar
Quote Database
Red Hat v SCO
Salus Book
SCEA v Hotz
SCO Appeals
SCO Bankruptcy
SCO Financials
SCO Overview
SCO v IBM
SCO v Novell
SCO:Soup2Nuts
SCOsource
Sean Daly
Software Patents
Switch to Linux
Transcripts
Unix Books

Gear

Groklaw Gear

Click here to send an email to the editor of this weblog.


You won't find me on Facebook


Donate

Donate Paypal


No Legal Advice

The information on Groklaw is not intended to constitute legal advice. While Mark is a lawyer and he has asked other lawyers and law students to contribute articles, all of these articles are offered to help educate, not to provide specific legal advice. They are not your lawyers.

Here's Groklaw's comments policy.


What's New

STORIES
No new stories

COMMENTS last 48 hrs
No new comments


Sponsors

Hosting:
hosted by ibiblio

On servers donated to ibiblio by AMD.

Webmaster
Tridge Speaks
Thursday, April 21 2005 @ 02:38 AM EDT

Groklaw's stevem heard Tridge's speech today at the LCA 2005 conference, Australia's national Linux conference, and he has a report for us:

This was taken from my memory of Dr. Andrew Tridgell's keynote at this years LCA2005 Conference.

Essentially Tridge did *NOT* do anything that anyone could ever possibly ever take as breaking a BitKeeper licence, as far as I can see. How was it done? He, like any good sysadmin would, first off telnetted to the BitKeeper port on a BitKeeper server.

$ telnet thunk.org 5000

WhooHoo! Connection! So, next obvious step that we *all* do is type in the obvious:

help

Back came a list of commands to manipulate the BitKeeper server and ask things of it. Well, according to Tridge, a bit of reading of the LKML (Linux Kernel Email List) shows that the "clone" command is the way to checkout someones source code repository.

So Tridge's massive "reverse engineering" project came down to a single line of shell script:

$ echo clone | nc thunk.org 5000 > e2fsprogs.dat

Hey presto, Tridge has just checked out from a BitKeeper repository into the file e2fsprogs.dat.

The audience was laughing and cheering Tridge on as he explained just what a Mountain had been made of this Molehill. And I mean made by both sides of the issue -- those who he said he was some Uber Reverse Engineering Wizard and those who claimed that he MUST have used a BK client.

Funny report, isn't it? Anyway, now you know Tridge's side of the story.


  


Tridge Speaks | 380 comments | Create New Account
Comments belong to whoever posts them. Please notify us of inappropriate comments.
Off topic here please
Authored by: fudisbad on Thursday, April 21 2005 @ 02:58 AM EDT
For current events, legal filings and Nasdaq delisting rulings.

Please make links clickable.
Example: <a href="http://example.com">Click here</a>

---
See my bio for copyright details re: this post.
Darl McBride, show your evidence!

[ Reply to This | # ]

Corrections here please
Authored by: fudisbad on Thursday, April 21 2005 @ 02:59 AM EDT
If required.

---
See my bio for copyright details re: this post.
Darl McBride, show your evidence!

[ Reply to This | # ]

ROFL
Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, April 21 2005 @ 03:01 AM EDT
That's the funniest thing I've read all year.

[ Reply to This | # ]

  • ROFL - Authored by: belzecue on Thursday, April 21 2005 @ 03:13 AM EDT
    • Hehe - Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, April 21 2005 @ 03:44 AM EDT
    As bad as hacking anonymously into FTP-servers
    Authored by: ak on Thursday, April 21 2005 @ 03:06 AM EDT
    Tridge probably also helped IBM to anonymously hack into The SCO Group Inc's
    FTP-server.

    [ Reply to This | # ]

    Thank You Tridge
    Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, April 21 2005 @ 03:17 AM EDT
    I recall that Linus ranted that no good came of your project; but I just wanted
    to say thank you and point out that some great good came of our project
    already.

    Linux is now (almost certainly) moving to a F/OSS source control system -- and
    that already is a very good thing.

    Also, this article sure brightened my day. ROTFL!

    [ Reply to This | # ]

    Then why didn't he say that before?
    Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, April 21 2005 @ 03:22 AM EDT
    He'd rather <em>be</em> right than <em>do</em> right, I
    assume. If he wants to be smug and supercillious, he can sod off and work for a
    corporate entity, as far as I'm concerned. FOSS is built on acting ethically
    <em>even towards people you disagree with</em>.

    [ Reply to This | # ]

    The Register article
    Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, April 21 2005 @ 03:23 AM EDT
    Tridgell demos Bitkeeper interoperability | The Register
    http:// www.theregister.co.uk/2005/04/21/tridgell_bitkeeper_howto/

    [ Reply to This | # ]

    coat tails
    Authored by: kh on Thursday, April 21 2005 @ 03:30 AM EDT
    Larry McVoy:
    Larry has a very clear moral standpoint: "You can compete with me, but you can't do so by riding on my coat-tails. Solve the problems on your own, and compete _honestly_. Don't compete by looking at my solution." And that is what the BK license boils down to. It says: "Get off my coat-tails, you free-loader". And I can't really argue against that.
    We are all riding on each others coat tails here, or as Isaac Newton said:
    If I see further than my forefathers it's because I stand on the shoulders of giants.
    It's a question of whether you want to take what other people have done and add your "great idea" and let other people use it and add to it or not.

    [ Reply to This | # ]

    • Pivotal inventions. - Authored by: kinrite on Thursday, April 21 2005 @ 03:36 AM EDT
    • coat tails - Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, April 21 2005 @ 03:49 AM EDT
      • coat tails - Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, April 21 2005 @ 06:58 AM EDT
    • coat tails - Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, April 21 2005 @ 04:31 AM EDT
      • coat tails - Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, April 21 2005 @ 11:32 AM EDT
    • standing on the shoulders of giants - Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, April 21 2005 @ 05:01 PM EDT
      • On this quote - Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, April 22 2005 @ 08:01 PM EDT
    • coat tails - Authored by: Anonymous on Saturday, April 23 2005 @ 04:05 PM EDT
    Tridge Speaks
    Authored by: nathan.sidwell on Thursday, April 21 2005 @ 04:59 AM EDT
    When a server responds to 'help' with a 'this is how you can talk to me' blurb,
    it looks like an invitation to me. There's nothing in the response about any
    restrictions or words like 'issuing commands means you agree to the licence'.

    This is up there with the lecture I used to give undergrads about how to talk
    directly to an SMTP server and therefore spoof email.

    [ Reply to This | # ]

    Tridge Speaks
    Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, April 21 2005 @ 05:18 AM EDT

    I have to wonder: if this was the sum total of the reverse engineering project, why was such a big thing made of it? Surely if he simply telnetted in and could happily use that to check out a BitKeeper tree to his satisfaction then that would have been the end of it, and no-one would ever have known.

    The only way that this could have resulted in a revocation of the free BitKeeper availability must have been that Andrew Tridgell made it appear that he was developing a tool to interoperate with BitKeeper.

    If all he was doing was telnetting in, but claiming/making it seem like he was reverse engineering the protocol, then I'm afraid it does fit in with Linus Torvald's judgement that he was "just being destructive". The license would have been well-known, and I believe that he was already asked to stop doing it once (to which he verbally agreed) before the license was revoked. The only purpose to making it sound like more was to provoke the license removal.

    I must also say that I'm not entirely in agreement with the "he wasn't using BitKeeper and so wasn't bound by its license". True, he wouldn't have been legally bound by the license, but if by his actions (as a prominent member of the open source community) he was causing the removal of that tool for the rest of the group then surely he had not the moral right to do so. There are considerations beyond what you can and can't do legally, and causing the removal of the tool that many other developers were using (by all accounts deliberately) is, while certainly not illegal, hardly commendable behaviour.

    As others have said, if he had developed a replacement SCM which could have rivalled BitKeeper then it would have presented a strong case for switching. As it is, he appears to have removed a highly productive tool from the community at large which does not currently have a replacement. As such, he has hampered kernel development while dividing the community. This negatively affects a large chunk of the open source community. As such, I can't condone his actions.

    Some would argue that Linus Torvalds, by adopting the BitKeeper software, has already forced a decision on the community. However the benefits of this have already been seen in faster and better development of the kernel. The free SCM replacement would, I believe, have happened eventually. By causing the removal of BitKeeper before the community was ready for this, I don't see anything positive in what Andrew Tridgell has done.

    [ Reply to This | # ]

    What format is the repository file ?
    Authored by: gibodean on Thursday, April 21 2005 @ 05:43 AM EDT
    OK, so Tridge just checks out the bitkeeper repository into a file, but what
    format is that file ? Is that a standard format that can easily be used by
    other source management systems ? Or, is the problem that the file is a
    proprietary, bitkeeper specific one, that there are no docs on how to interpret
    ? And hence McVoy is upset about Tridge figuring out that file format and
    possibly doing some sort of conversion to standard formats ?

    I don't think this whole thing is just due to using a standard interface to
    extract the file. I strongly suspect it goes beyond that.

    [ Reply to This | # ]

    Tridge Speaks
    Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, April 21 2005 @ 05:44 AM EDT
    As far as I can see Tidge might be legally in the right here but what he did was
    still needlesly destructive.

    He knew what he was doing was in risk of damaging the whole linux kernel
    development process before he started. He was then even warned off by Linus
    himself and asked to stop, which he didn't. You can hardly be suprised at Linus
    being annoyed with him when the result was what Linus feared - the effective
    destruction of Linus' ability to use his chosen tool.

    What was the use of Tidge's project? It's utterly useless to linux development
    as we all know and he knew that whilst going about it - infact it has hindered
    development. Tidge knew that if continued to work on his tool then BK would no
    longer be available for use in the kernel development process. So how can
    building that tool have been designed to help anyone - as soon as it was made
    public knowledge it effectivley made itself redundant.

    So what was Tidge's reasons for doing this - the only answer I can come up with
    is a puritanical and fundamental belief that he was in the right about something
    which is IMHO a religious belief. Does that really excuse him for destroying
    somebody else's development process?

    Not only that Tidge's actions have been in danger of opening a big rift in the
    open source community between the pragmatists who believe that open source is a
    beneficial and superior development process and those who take to it more like a
    religion. This we could really do without, we've got RMS already, he does a
    good enough job at that on his own.

    For me open source is as much about freedom of choice as about freedom of speech
    or information. What Tidge did was to deliberatley reverse a choice someone
    else made - not by debate or even by providing a new and better solution but by
    sabotage.

    Linus is and was completley right in this although perhaps his public
    condemnation was a little out of place for him, but then you've got to expect
    someone to be annoyed when another party deliberatley sabotages their work.

    I'm not criticising Tidge for having his stong convictions and beliefs, however
    that doesn't give him the right to force them onto everyone else or condemn
    others for having different beliefs. Actually I agree with him in principle but
    I learned as a toddler that the world doesn't work on principle, otherwise we'd
    all be communists and it would work :-)

    As far as I can tell Linus simply wants to use the best tool for the job - when
    the tool he feels he wants or needs doesn't exist he will then go out and
    produce one - this is how Linux itself started. Linus is about getting things
    done, which is what software development requires otherwise you rarely produce
    stable versions (Enlightenment and Debian both fail at this IMHO). Now of
    course Linus has to write a new SCM system and I for one don't envy him the
    task.

    So please, lets stop this religious war that Tidge seems to have opened up and
    concentrate on what we're good at - producing great software!

    [ Reply to This | # ]

    he must type slowly
    Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, April 21 2005 @ 06:51 AM EDT
    if that's all he did then he must really type slowly since the discussions
    between all parties was reportedly going on for weeks, (with him promising to
    stop while they were going on), and it was only after they found that he hadn't
    stopped that Larry blew up.

    there has to be a LOT more to this then just what Tridge is reporting (like him
    trying to feed data back into bitkeeper, which would be the logical next step,
    and also far more likly to go wrong and be noticed)

    [ Reply to This | # ]

    Tridge Speaks
    Authored by: stevem on Thursday, April 21 2005 @ 06:58 AM EDT
    Can I additionally add that Tridge would *easily* have to be one of the most
    entertaining speakers I have heard in quite some time.


    His kynote was *excellent*. Covered a lot of ground, software engineering and
    how it applies to Samba 4 and previous versions and the like. And many lessons
    for the rest of us.
    eg. valgrind is superb. Learn it. gcov is superb. Learn it.
    Combine them and the magic shines. There was a third point in there as well,
    which I can't recall. Figures... :-)


    But *please*, take the above article light heartedly. I was in a screaming hurry
    when I wrote it and was simply recalling from my very few jotted notes.


    This being a Linux Conf, I guess Tridge felt he had to explain, what little he
    could, as an appropriate "thing to do". The above revelations came
    right at the tail end of his Keynote.
    Honestly, when you see what such a fuss had been made about how he could or
    couldn't do any reverse engineering technically, And then to clearly demonstrate
    just how *trivial* it is to access a BK server and hence do "wire
    analysis" without a fancy schmancy client; Well you couldn't help but laugh
    at the sheer absurdity of this entire situation.


    And can I stress, the audience was all but literally laughing their heads off.


    Cheers!


    - SteveM

    [ Reply to This | # ]

    • Tridge Speaks - Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, April 21 2005 @ 07:03 AM EDT
    • Tridge Speaks - Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, April 21 2005 @ 04:22 PM EDT
    Tridge did nothing wrong. Linus is wrong.
    Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, April 21 2005 @ 07:21 AM EDT
    I think a lot of folks simply cannot accept that Linus
    could ever do or be wrong. In this case, he is way wrong.
    He made a bad deal when he adopted the closed, proprietary
    BitKeeper. Anyone who follows the kernel mailing list
    knows that Larry McVoy is not to be trusted. He changed
    the license frequently in reaction to perceived threats to
    his "intellectual property." He acts like he created
    BitKeeper completely from scratch, and with complete
    originality. Well, he's full of it. McVoy got three years
    of priceless PR and development assistance from the kernel
    team, and he built on the work of others. Now he wants to
    keep it all to himself, and not allow others to "steal"
    even the ideas and concepts behind BitKeeper.

    Linus should be mad at his buddy McVoy for yanking
    BitKeeper away from the kernel team- what kind of childish
    nonsense is that, anyway? He's punishing other
    people for what Tridgell supposedly did.

    McVoy has demonstrated for years that he is not to be
    trusted. We expect better from Linus- hopefully he will
    realize he blew it.

    [ Reply to This | # ]

    Drug pusher tactics?
    Authored by: darkonc on Thursday, April 21 2005 @ 07:43 AM EDT
    I have no problems with McVoy protecting his software investment per se (I'm getting a bit edgy about using the 'IP' moniker), but what I'm seeing is a bit more disturbing than that.

    Under the guise of 'no reverse engineering' and the flag of 'intellectual property', he seems to be claiming effective control of a good deal more than that -- he seems to be claiming ownership of the entire Linux change tree. This is where the 'drug pusher' analogy kicks in.

    You see: in a large software project (and Linux certainly applies here), the version change information is almost as important as a static dump of the current tree.. Version information allows you to keep track of who changed what when (and even why). It allows you to merge in some changes, back out others and even track how productive individual users have been.

    BitKeeper doesn't allow non-clients to get version information. All you can get is a static dump. On the other hand, if you get a BitKeeper license, you get version information, but it seems like you're not allowed to 'reverse engineer', which seems to include getting version info out of the client and passing that information on to a non-client user.

    In other words, If you walk away from BitKeeper, you might have to walk away from the entire version tree starting from when you imported your software into Bitkeeper.

    This is where the 'drug pusher' analogy kicks in -- The longer you've been using BitKeeper, and the longer you've been 'locking in' your change information, the harder it is to walk away from BitKeeper. If you do it for long enough, you can get to the point where you really can't walk away from it without being effectively disfunctional for quite some period of time.... Kinda like a drug addict. The longer you've been 'using' the harder it is to walk away.

    If this went on long enough, we might end up at a the point where the Linux kernel community could be effectively paralyzed by a cold-turky loss of BitKeeper. After that point, someone might buy out McVoy. That someone might then sell out to (say) Microsoft, and Microsoft could then suddenly start charging tens of thousands of dollars for a copy of the formerly 'free' BitKeeper -- or even sabotage the Linux tree in subtle ways. They could even just hold the entire Linux tree hostage in any of a number of other ways -- possibly doing, thru subterfuge, what SCO tried (and, apparently, failed) to do do thru the courts: effectively claim ownership of the Linux kernel.

    There's a lot of conjecture in the above, and some assumptions about what you're allowed to get out of BitKeeper when (I've never used BitKeeper myself). If I've made any material misconstruations of the current state of affairs, I'd love to hear of the corrections.

    ---
    Powerful, committed communication. Touching the jewel within each person and bringing it to life..

    [ Reply to This | # ]

    There's a lot more to it than that. . .
    Authored by: droth on Thursday, April 21 2005 @ 08:31 AM EDT
    Okay, that was hilarious. And a definite "d'oh!" moment for me - simply telnetting to a bk server never occurred to me as a way to get at the data.

    But simply telnetting to a bk server is not what Tridgell's tool does. McVoy's complaint was that Tridgell is/was working on a tool that would allow someone *write* access to a bk repository. From the News Forge article:

    . . . We did get a verbal promise from OSDL that Tridge had discontinued his work and would not begin again as long as we were trying to work things out. We believed we had an uneasy truce, but it ends up Tridge was still working.

    We ended up in a no-win situation. OSDL didn't appear to care and we couldn't trust what we were being told. With that we were fairly confident that Tridge was going to release his code. That was a problem for us for two reasons:

    a) Corruption. BK is a complicated system, there are >10,000 replicas of the BK database holding Linux floating around. If a problem starts moving through those there is no way to fix them all by hand. This happened once before, a user tweaked the ChangeSet file, and it costs $35,000 plus a custom release to fix it.

    So McVoy's fear was that either someone was going to use Tridge's tool to commit directly to a working repository, or that someone would export using Tridge's tool and commit back with a bk client but commit bad data. Either way you parse it, McVoy's problem with Tridge's work starts the moment someone puts code back into a repository.

    I haven't seen any statement from Tridge that his tool doesn't do that, and as far as I know, the tool hasn't been released yet. If it does allow commits to a BK repository, then I completely understand McVoy's concerns.

    If it doesn't allow commits, then my question is: why make it at all? There's already a free BK client available for read-only access. Why did Tridge need to write a new one?

    [ Reply to This | # ]

    Business justification
    Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, April 21 2005 @ 09:36 AM EDT
    I perceive great potential over FOSS for all businesses but especially for
    businesses that are not in the software buisness themselves. My dream is
    partially revealed in the following recent incident here at work:

    Company wide mailing went out explaining IT was removing Visio from all PCs that
    hadn't executed it for 45 days. The licenses could then be reused by people who
    really needed it and the Company would save US$1.5M yearly.

    Now why not take an existing FOSS program and assign 10 fulltime software
    engineers to enhance it. After a year or two the Visio replacement is so much
    better than Visio the Company starts actively looking for more software to
    replace in this manner. Other companies have joined the effort on the Visio
    replacement and my company is now only assigning 3 engineers to the project.
    But the other companies that joined in have contributed solutions to their
    problems that I never thought of and the Visio replacement is even more useful
    to my company.

    Over a 5 year period my company has spent less money on developing the Visio
    replacement than the cost of Visio licensing. The replacement is a better
    solution because my company put the effort into enhancing it themselves and
    nobody else knows what the Company needs. The outlook for the next 5 years is
    for ever decreasing costs as more companies have joined the development effort.

    I would rather see all of BitKeeper with a GPL. Still plenty of potential for
    profitability. It is unpleasent to see all the benefit BitKeeper got out of
    Linux kernel development experience yet retained the power to take the tool
    away.

    [ Reply to This | # ]

    Linus speaks out, on RWT
    Authored by: _Arthur on Thursday, April 21 2005 @ 09:44 AM EDT
    http://www.realworldtech.com/forums/index.cfm?
    action=detail&PostNum=3322&Thread=2&entryID=49312&roomID=11

    Tridge wanted to create a tool that checked out BK trees
    for people who didn't sign the license. But it still
    needed BK to actually do anything useful - since it would
    not actually do the work that BK did.

    "Hey, that's a useful helper". Yes, except when it isn't.

    And it isn't, if releasing it just causes the BK protocols
    to change, and people who used BK in the first place to
    have to stop using it, and when using the tool against a
    BK repository is a violation of the license that the BK
    user agreed to.

    See the problem now? Tridge's tool would have been useful
    if that usage had been sanctioned by BitMover. But since
    that tool ends up invalidating your right to use BK in
    the first place, and since that tool can not replace
    what BK did, then yes, the tool is pointless.

    So you have three choices
    - don't use the tool (which makes it useless)
    - use the tool, but stop using BK (which makes it useless)
    - use the tool _and_ use BK, which violates the BK
    license

    Two useless cases, and one outright license violation.
    ...
    Anyway, it's a moot point. It's been an "interesting"
    experience. I'm sure Linux will be stronger for it, since
    it forced me to get off my fat ass and write my own tool.
    It's the old "whatever doesn't kill you.." thing.

    The only real letdown (and the reason I've been irritated
    with you - sorry about that) has literally been people who
    are happy about other peoples pain. That really gets my
    goat.

    (Linus)

    http://www.realworldtech.com/forums/index.cfm?
    action=detail&PostNum=3322&Thread=19&entryID=49354&roomID=11

    _Arthur

    [ Reply to This | # ]

    Tridge Speaks
    Authored by: Bas Burger on Thursday, April 21 2005 @ 09:57 AM EDT
    I replied a few days ago to the thread on realworldtech,
    http://www.realworldtech.com/forums/index.cfm?action=detail&PostNum=3322&
    ;Thread=2&entryID=49312&roomID=11

    There I already stated that people like Dr. Tridgell are only trying to make
    things interoperable.
    I also stated that no program, either propietary or open source have no right to
    fence off interoperability, the EU seems to agree with me in their case against
    MS.

    Mr. Torvalds should have think more about the consequences of using a propietary
    service, even when that service is constructed by a good friend.
    What happened is exactly what we in the free software camp warn of, it only
    takes one single efford of anybody creating interoperability to blow that little
    deal.
    So once again we cannot trust any propietary software maker to his/her word.
    Dr. Tridgell did only what was inevitable, sooner or later somebody would try to
    make that service interoperable.

    While I am very gartefull that Mr. Torvalds started the Linux kernel, I have not
    that much trust in his leadership talent. I think he lacks real vision ala RMS
    and is too pragmatic at times. Of course this is my private opinion.
    Personally I value Dr. Tridgell more important then Mr. Torvalds without knowing
    them both however.
    I will spend no words on here about Mr. McVoy, he is not really important here,
    he did what any propietary does and must do to keep his product closed.

    Bas.

    [ Reply to This | # ]

    Tridge Speaks
    Authored by: Bas Burger on Thursday, April 21 2005 @ 10:02 AM EDT
    I have a question...

    Is a piece of open source software still open source when it is embedded in a
    propietary system that keeps out everybody that does not sign a contract?

    I think BitKeeper was a blatant GPL violation, can somebody from the FSF explain
    the consequenses?

    Bas.

    [ Reply to This | # ]

    Tridge Speaks
    Authored by: Nick Bridge on Thursday, April 21 2005 @ 12:30 PM EDT
    Good for you, Tridge!

    Look at McVoy's attitude from 2003:

    From Richard Stallman Subject Bitkeeper Date Fri, 18 Jul 2003 15:51:36 -0400 > If you are trying to copy BK, give it up. We'll simply follow in the > footsteps of every other company faced with this sort of thing and change > the protocol every 6 months. Since you would be chasing us you can never > catch up. If you managed to stay close then we'd put digital signatures > into the protocol to prevent your clone from interoperating with BK. I think it would be appropriate at this point to write a free client that talks with Bitkeeper, and for Linux developers to start switching to that from Bitkeeper. At that point, McVoy will face a hard choice: if he carries out these threats, he risks alienating the community that he hopes will market Bitkeeper for him.

    This should never have happened - BitKeeper was the wrong choice. It's not pragmatic to be beholden to someone like this, it's plain idiotic.

    Going with BitKeeper under those circumstances, made this eventuality inevitable. And many, many people said so.

    [ Reply to This | # ]

    Tridge Speaks
    Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, April 21 2005 @ 01:59 PM EDT
    Hey Tridge, congratulations. You just hacked bit keeper the at the same level
    IBM hacked SCO's web site for a copy of Linux. Nice company you're keeping
    there!

    Come on people, when are we going to start using a little common sense.

    (telnet is such a cutting edge tool, hardly anyone would have the expertise to
    handle this.)

    True, the vendor of Bitkeeper can rescind the gift, but it doesn't make for good
    public relations.

    [ Reply to This | # ]

    Can they all use ClearCase now??
    Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, April 21 2005 @ 02:18 PM EDT
    I mean, IBM is Open Source's big buddy now and they bought Atria/Rational a
    while ago...

    Maybe it's time they showed what a real supporter or Linux they are, rather than
    giving away patents on anti-tamper screws.

    [ Reply to This | # ]

    Tridge's Bitkeeper Client
    Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, April 21 2005 @ 06:40 PM EDT
    Tridge's client is now available. Perhaps some of the real programmers here can tell us what it actually does.

    [ Reply to This | # ]

    Tridge Speaks
    Authored by: rezende on Thursday, April 21 2005 @ 09:41 PM EDT
    The BK incident, with all debates that followed, has been good for something
    else too: Revealing who's in for what at the FOSS arena.

    [ Reply to This | # ]

    Groklaw © Copyright 2003-2013 Pamela Jones.
    All trademarks and copyrights on this page are owned by their respective owners.
    Comments are owned by the individual posters.

    PJ's articles are licensed under a Creative Commons License. ( Details )