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Following up after a day in the shop

Posted Sep 27, 2004 19:39 UTC (Mon) by kevinbsmith (guest, #4778)
In reply to: Following up after a day in the shop by lm
Parent article: An Interview with Tom Lord of Arch (O'ReillyNet)

Larry,

I appreciate your thoughtful response. Other people have already addressed most of the points, but I wanted to add just a couple notes.

Perhaps Bitmover doesn't change the wording of the license that often, although yearly significant changes seem somewhat frequent to me. However, it seems to me (and I could be wrong) that the interpretation of the license changes more often than that. It seems like every few months I hear about another person or group who is somehow excluded from being able to use BK. For example, I was not previously aware that small businesses who employ advocates of FLOSS BK competitors would be denied the option to purchase BK licenses.

The scariest part of the licensing is that someone who already has a license can have it suddenly pulled from them. With most software, once you have a license for a particular version, you can at least continue using that version forever, as long as you obey the license you accepted when you started using the software. With BK, it seems that is not the case, based on what I have read.

As far as your personal FLOSS contributions: I have not followed your career outside Bitmover, so I was unaware of your GPL work. For whatever true free/open software you have written, tested, or documented: Thank you. Seriously. And thank you for doing what you think is best for the Linux kernel. In contexts other than BK, you may indeed be a valued member of the FLOSS community, and I did not intend to take that away from you.

So let me rephrase my statement as: I still believe that in the context of BK, Bitmover is not part of the FLOSS community, any more than other proprietary companies who merely provide gratis tools (and there are many). In fact, most such companies do not discriminate against specific FLOSS contributors or advocates.

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Following up after a day in the shop

Posted Sep 27, 2004 23:48 UTC (Mon) by lm (guest, #6402) [Link]

Hi Kevin,

It's a pleasure to actually have a conversation rather than a flamefest, thanks for doing so, I mean it.

On the topic of excluding people, this is just FUD raised by people who want everything in the world to be GPLed. Other than Zenaan, in our entire history I am aware of exactly one other person who we excluded, Ben Collins, and we later worked out an agreement with him and he's off using BK.

It's true that we could use the license as a baseball bat but it's also true that we don't do that. Lots of people at Red Hat use BK and have for years, in spite of the fact that in theory they are not allowed to do so. If one of them started working on arch and we saw arch getting BK features one by one then we might do something about it. But they haven't and so we don't bother them.

Bottom line: all the fuss that has been made about the non-compete clause excluding people is just FUD by the GPL police. All sorts of people use BK, we've counted more than 10,000 active branches of the Linux kernel in BK and even if each developer had 10 branches that's still 1,000 developers. I'm sure you could make a case that we could exclude lots of those developers but that's missing the point. The point is that we don't. Not unless one of them tells us that they are going off to copy BK. I wasn't involved with Zenaan but I got the impression he didn't leave us any choice.

As for pulling the license, again, we could but we haven't. What the license says has to do with support, not beating people up. We have more than 50,000 free users - that's a lot of support and as others have pointed out, we take support very seriously. The deal we want is that you stay current so that we don't have to handle the same old bug 50,000 times. The license says you have to upgrade when we issue a new release that has regression tests that wouldn't pass on the older release[s] (which is pretty much true every release, we have a very extensive regression test suite). While we have the legal right to force you to upgrade, we have never done so. People are aware of our reasons for wanting you to stay current and by and large they respect that.

It's worth noting that all the FUD spread about our license is just that, FUD. While we believe we can make our license stick if need be the truth is that if the license is genuinely unreasonable you can take us to court and win, the courts will side with you if we are being jerks. That doesn't mean you get to win because you think I'm a jerk, it means you get to win if we are not allowing you fair use or reasonable enjoyment or whatever the legal mumbo jumbo is.

Finally, your last comment is the one I'd really like to address. It's most unfortunate that you feel that way because BK exists simply to help the Linux effort, specifically Linus. Joe Buck suggested that I did that as a marketing move. There are two flaws with that theory: it doesn't account for the 5 or 6 years that I worked with Linus on Linux before writing a line of code on BitKeeper and it doesn't account for the fact that I couldn't market my way out of a wet paper bag. Look at me, I can show up with a free $100 bill and manage to piss you off in the process of giving it to you. And I'm the guy that came up with this brilliant marketing plan? If I'm a marketing genius my goal must be to piss off the world because I do a great job of it. Face it, the "BK + Linux == marketing" theory doesn't hold water and anyone who has been around for the last ten years knows that. The idea of me in marketing is a joke, a bad joke.

BK was created to help you. I'm not looking for your thanks or gratitude but I am looking for you to realize that what I'm telling you is the truth. I picked the path where I could make the most positive difference to the open source world. I'm a good engineer, maybe a great engineer, but there is no way that I'm as good as Linus+Alan+Dave+Greg+Andrew+.... If I can help 1000 engineers be 5% more productive that's a 50x more good than I could have done by writing kernel code. You don't like that BK isn't GPLed. What you don't get is that a GPLed answer wouldn't have helped. It costs way too much money to do something like BK, there is more than 100 man years of top quality, full time, 60-80 hours/week, engineering in BK. You can wait for an open source replacement but you will wait for a long, long time. On the other hand, BK is here right now, helping, and has been for years. And there is no replacement for it in sight.

I've been saying the same things for years, this stuff is hard, it costs a lot of money to get it right, and there is a big payoff for the end users. Look at http://www.bitkeeper.com/press/2004-03-17.html and you can see the payoff, nobody disputes that. So *you* are benefitting right now by the use of BK on the Linux kernel, on MySQL, etc. Maybe some day there will be a suitable GPLed replacement but right now there isn't. And BK is helping the development of lots and lots of open source.

Can you see how perhaps I might not agree with your view that we're not part of the FLOSS community? Maybe you still disagree with me but that's not going to help you, it's going to hurt you. You are rejecting people who are trying to help because they don't want to help in your narrow definition of help. That's unfortunate.

Following up after a day in the shop

Posted Sep 28, 2004 8:07 UTC (Tue) by lolando (subscriber, #7139) [Link]

There's a difference between "helping the FLOSS community", which I think nobody can reasonably deny BK the software and BM the provider of hosting are doing, and "being part of the FLOSS community", which is a criterion only the license can fulfill.

Following up after a day in the shop

Posted Sep 30, 2004 17:07 UTC (Thu) by rgoates (guest, #3280) [Link]

Larry, thanks for taking the time for this discussion. I've found it
very educational.

Following up after a day in the shop

Posted Oct 1, 2004 1:40 UTC (Fri) by lm (guest, #6402) [Link]

My pleasure, hopefully it's been helpful. It's definitely not an easy path that we've choosen, lots of people are very unhappy BK is used in the open source world at all, they view it as a failure of the open source model and a very visible failure at that. I can easily see that people would take the position that they should use the open source stuff and if it isn't good enough then they should fix it. Makes perfect sense, I'd argue the same thing in their shoes.

However, this particular product space is really difficult. Every engineer thinks they can do a better job in a few weeks with some scripts and CVS. Unfortunately, that's just not even close to being true. I've done this before and I knew how much work it was before I started again. And to tell the truth, I had a little of that "oh, this will be easy" feeling. BitMover was created to do Linux clusters, not source management. I told my people "we just have to hack out this little source management tool for Linus and then we'll get on the clusters, OK?" Yeah, right. It became clear in about of 6 months that this was a far bigger effort than I had anticipated and we had to have a business model or we'd never get to anything good.

If there had been any way I could have done this as a GPLed product I would have. I get it. I get it more than most of the people flaming me. But even if I were wealthy enough to do this for free (which I'm not) it wouldn't have worked. This job is a lot bigger than me, a lot bigger. I needed help and in order to attract that help I needed something more than my stellar personality and the possibility of helping the OSS world. People wanted to get paid, they wanted stock options, and they wanted those options to be potentially worth something. You just can't make that happen with an open source product. But what about Red Hat? Red Hat isn't an open source product, it is about 1000 open source products, and Red Hat wrote less than 1% of those products. Red Hat is a packaging company by and large. We aren't. We have one product and the support model doesn't work for us, the packaging model doesn't work for us, that was obvious. We needed an answer which generated enough revenue to pay us to make a better product for you. And for our commercial customers.

We had to have a commercial model that generated revenue. It sucks, all of us would rather be hacking away on GPLed source, that would be cool. But we have to eat, we have to support our families, and most importantly, we have to do a good job for you. We simply can't do that with an open source business model.

Following up after a day in the shop

Posted Oct 1, 2004 10:18 UTC (Fri) by hppnq (guest, #14462) [Link]

Larry, thanks for your time explaining all this. It is too bad that an Open Source business model doesn't cut it for you, I really believe that you are missing out on a lot of the good stuff that Open Source can do for you. But I am aware that you know this. ;-)

So, I wish you all the best! Thanks again.