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.
