An Interview with Tom Lord of Arch (O'ReillyNet)

"You can't compete" is a *subset* of no reverse engineering.

I won't comment as to the enforceability of your anti-reverse-engineering clause, because those in general have not been tested in American courts, and I'm not an American.

Instead of just building the best mousetrap, you want to try and hide how your mousetrap works. Legal or illegal, it doesn't help get the best mousetrap on the market, and you can't really expect us to like it.

No-reverse-engineering clauses really rub me the wrong way even without
that extra twist.

I'm changing my mind again: no BitKeeper for me, ever.

I completely defend your free-market right to refuse to sell to whoever you want, and certainly your right to choose a proprietary licence. But I have to say all these shifts in the licence worry me. Just the other day I recommended bk to a business user. Had I known about this I would have thought again. I couldn't recommend storing code in a system whose licence can be denied because you dislike something that one employee said.

My employer competes with IBM products, but are they going to suddenly revoke our Clearcase licence, or refuse to sell a new one? I certainly hope not. I suppose the possibility is a strong argument for using a free system as soon as there is one that's good enough.

So you'll have to explain it a bit better, if you care. Right now, I would never recommend using Bitkeeper *exactly* because of this clause. Maybe I don't fully get it, but as a licensee I would be worried about letting you know that I'm thinking about switching to another version control system.

I freely admit that I am not at all involved with or affected by anything related to bitkeeper, but even as a detached party, your license shifts do worry me.

Two years ago you said, or at least strongly implied, that BKCL had no non-compete clause. In fact you even specifically mentioned that BKCL did not, in order to defend yourself against the (at the time) controversial notion of BKL having a non-compete clause.

Now we find that not only the free users but also even the commercial users of BK are not permitted to develop competing software. Can you imagine (say) Microsoft refusing to license Windows to any person developing competing OSs, or to any company employing any person developing competing OSs?

That is EVIL.

You can't claim on the one hand that the no-reverse-engineering clause already prohibits competing against you, and on the other hand refuse to sell BK to competitors. This very position is a contradiction in terms -- if the clause is sufficient protection, then why do you feel the need to further protect yourself with discriminatory sales tactics?

I can understand your logic in not making BK free software, but I cannot understand your logic in refusing to sell BK to competitors. The no-reverse-engineering clause already provides you enough protection. Any incremental gain to BK from sales discrimination is not worth committing such an evil act, if only for public relations reasons.

This is the last completed project, a restoration of a parks planer:

http://www.bitmover.com/lm/parks/

and this is the current project, getting an old mill working:

http://www.bitmover.com/lm/mill/

and I have to admit that I like working on these old tools one heck of a lot more than arguing the finer points of licensing. It would be nice if you guys came up with a model that (a) made you happy, (b) kept Linus happy, and (c) made us enough money that I could spend a lot of time in the shop and never, ever, ever have a licensing discussion again. Any time any of you want to take over the job of running BitMover you just send in your application, OK?

Anybody who has followed Linux kernel development for the past couple of years must be convinced that your company has developed a highly capable tool by looking at the evidence provided in the form of the high quality kernel releases (which was probably exactly the effect you intended). Irrespective of your legitimate commercial intentions, the way you chose to promote your product has greatly benefitted the FLOSS community by increasing the kernel maintainers' productivity. You deserve to be applauded for this.

Patents probably would have been a better choice for protection but remember that I had a goal of helping Linus, and there was little chance that he would adopt a patented technology.

However, it seems to me that you take Linus to be more stupid than he is. Do you really think that he would have rejected a patented technology just because they are EVIL^TM, but he would tolerate a sales practice that achieves the same effects? If he accepts BitMover's decision not to grant a free license to developers who intend to develop a free alternative, maybe he would not have rejected BK as a tool even if it included patented technology.

1. Don't keep changing the license. An unstable (and especially a revokeable) gratis license is scary. The fact that the non-gratis license also seems to be unstable and revokeable (at least in how it is enforced) is really scary. If people find a loophole that you find catastrophic, try to close all similar loopholes once and for all, rather than tightening your grip in a series of small steps. If they find another loophole, it might be better to just leave it open (possibly with a plea based on ethical/moral grounds for people not to use it). Also, realize that your goal of strict control may be incompatible with your desire to have the gratis version used on the Linux kernel.

2. Don't try quite so hard to ride the FLOSS (free/libre open source software) coattails. You have released a gratis product that helps certain open source developers. Big deal--so has Microsoft. That does not make you a patron of FLOSS, so don't expect FLOSS advocates to heap praise upon you. You continue to fight hard against certain other FLOSS projects (arch being an example). Expect to be criticized for that. You are not part of the FLOSS community, so don't expect to be treated as if you were.

It's a very emotional topic, and I appreciate that you are doing your best to run a business. Your abrasive public persona ceratinly doesn't help your cause. Hopefully you already realize that.

I also acknowlege that the kernel has benefitted greatly (at least in the short run) by using BK. I'm still concerned about the long run, however.

I do believe you are trying to satisfy a number of constraints while solving a difficult problem, and that your intentions are good. Accepting a license, however, means that I cannot trust anything that is not in the license. Any restrictions and rights regarding the software (say, BitKeeper) have to be in there, fair, square, and unambiguously, or I won't accept it. I'm sure companies are even more anal about this than I am, especially the ones that are your (potential) customers.

Have you ever considered using the GPL (or similar) for the basic, freely available functionality, and selling vendor added functionality and services to your customers? That way, I think, you get the best of both worlds. I see that it still involves the risk you are afraid of taking now, but I cannot believe that your customers are merely buying a license for the software. Surely you provide lots and lots of additional services? Sell that, and make us all happy. ;-)

You wouldn't be the first to choose this path, others are doing it rather succesfully, I think. Even if you concentrate on the actual software development and not so much the accompanying services, you would still do a lot better than your possible competitors, right? (Being the programmer that you are, I mean. ;-)

This is a time for new business models, and I respect the one you have chosen, even if I don't think it's the best solution.

(By the way, the current changes in business models are not restricted to producers. The way things are going now, the fact that software is Open Source might very well be the reason why consumers will choose to buy it in the first place.)

And, as someone else said, don't expect us to ever love your non-open-source license, even if it's more reasonable. Your goals and needs aren't ours, and even if we understand why you're doing it, doesn't mean we have to like it. To those of us who consider ourselves part of a free software community, you're an outsider, and will always be so long as you use don't use a Free license.

You can still compete, for a while, based on better services and support, while keeping your app proprietary. But you need to recognize that at some point your existing revenue stream is going to go away. If, by then, you have other products and services in the pipeline, or new capabilities in BK others can't match, you'll make it, otherwise you won't.

But your righteousness just makes you look bad. Making BK available to Linus wasn't charity, it was marketing, and brilliant marketing at that. The publicity you've received is more valuable than if you spent 100% of your revenue on advertising; it is the main reason why your paying customers know who you are. Because of this, the Linux kernel developers and users are not in your moral debt. Also, because of this, getting into bitter arguments with free software developers counteracts the logic of helping out Linus in the first place: you're trying to get good publicity for your product. The last thing I'd want to recommend to my boss is a supplier who appears to always be on the verge of suing his customers.

If I were in your position, I'd be quieter and less defensive. If people beat you up for not being DFSG-free, you can simply say that you respect their choice not to use your software; it's not worth arguing. Same if they beat up Linus for using your stuff; you don't need to fight that one. Write a FAQ and point people to it when they make the same point again and again.

Now if we were to take your GM vs Ford analogy a bit further in the context of BitKeeper.. GM and Ford will gladly sell cars to each other; even if their intent is to evaluate/use their respective technological gains to compete with each other.