This is a textbook case for a business school [LWN.net]

This is a textbook case for a business school

Posted Apr 6, 2005 17:16 UTC (Wed) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330)
In reply to: Linus on the BK withdrawal by mcelrath
Parent article: Linus on the BK withdrawal

Larry's been executing a brilliant marketing strategy all along. Marketing people at startups everywhere should be taking notes.

Larry saw a business opportunity: the version control systems in common use all sucked to one degree or another. But developing a good one would require lots of resources, and open source work wasn't putting bread on his table. And he clearly had the entrepreneurial itch and wanted to start a company. But how to get into a business where the competition is of the size of IBM (ClearCase)? How would anyone ever even hear of his company? And how would he manage to get the product to the rock-solid level required if anyone is going to trust their precious source code to it?

The answer, of course, was working with Linus and the kernel developers. Give them a free-beer license in exchange for serving as dedicated beta testers, and get huge amounts of publicity, so that techs the world over would soon know what BitKeeper is. Get none other than Linus Torvalds to give you publishable quotes. You can't buy that kind of publicity. Once you get to the level you want to get to, drop the free-as-in-beer version, and give people a read-only client so they don't lose access to their own data. Voila, you've bootstrapped a successful company from nothing. I admire Larry for pulling it off. The only thing I don't care for is the notion that there was ever any kind of charity involved; this was always strictly a business proposition.

I don't believe that Larry was ever so naive as to think that the people who cloned Unix and the Windows GUI wouldn't try to clone BitKeeper, so I don't take the claims that the withdrawal of the free BitKeeper has something to do with cloning efforts seriously. After all, withdrawing the free version would only speed up, not slow down, the cloners (unless they lose interest because Linus stops using BitKeeper at the same time, perhaps?). The imperatives of business required that the free version be withdrawn sometime, the only question was the timing.

(Log in to post comments)

This is a textbook case for a business school

Posted Apr 6, 2005 17:42 UTC (Wed) by bos (subscriber, #6154) [Link]

It was definitely a smart business move for Larry to help Linus out, no doubt about it, and he'll acknowledge as much to anyone. The rest of what you say is nonsense, though.

Larry really did bend over backwards, and for a *long* time, to accommodate people who didn't want to use the free BK due to its licensing restrictions, and who were mostly extremely rude about their demands. He did this long past the point where any reasonable person could call his motivations into question.

This is a textbook case for a business school

Posted Apr 6, 2005 17:49 UTC (Wed) by mcelrath (guest, #8094) [Link]

I think JoeBuck and hppnq are spot on. How does Larry bending over backward change that this was all a marketing strategy? Even if totally unintentional (which I doubt), it's still a great case for marketing study.

After making my original post, I read a bit more, and it seems Larry often encourages the development of a free alternative. Perhaps this way he could pull bitkeeper support from linux in a way that didn't alienate linux users. After 3 years, there is still no comparable alternative, and perhaps his company didn't intend to wait this long to end their marketing ploy. Thus, they had to find a way/excuse to pull the plug.

-- Bob

This is a textbook case for a business school

Posted Apr 6, 2005 23:09 UTC (Wed) by darthmdh (guest, #8032) [Link]

Easy. BitKeeper existed long before it was adopted by Linus. Linus adopted it because it was technically superior (and still is technically superior) to anything else that existed, and it was gaining popularity because of that (in a time when CVS was pretty much unmaintained, was failing security audits and wasn't up to the task of modern software development, and anything else in a usable state was proprietary)

All the crap about licences and so forth only started because certain so-called open source developers, who were more like information superhighway robbers, wanted to steal Larry's technically superior product.

And now, thanks to these thieves, we now no longer have a free BK tool. First we lost the source code (yes, BitKeeper used to be distributed with the entire source code back in the day). Now we've even lost the binaries. When we've lost twice, how can anyone claim we're winners?

There's no marketing ploys here, no malice, no excuses. Bitmover were getting constantly screwed by the community they loved and stuck around much longer than any other business would have. Thanks Larry & team, you have done gallantly and I wish you success for the future.

This is a textbook case for a business school

Posted Apr 7, 2005 0:22 UTC (Thu) by dlang (subscriber, #313) [Link]

actually the real story is that bitkeeper was developed FOR Linus to use. that's what shifted Larry from his current projects to full-time work on SCM's.

as part of the process Larry had to figure out how he would pay for the development costs and developed the bitkeeper options we all know about.

I want to add my thanks to Larry. he did a lot of good in the process and I hope that kernel development doesn't suffer too much before something new gets good enough to use.

This is a textbook case for a business school

Posted Apr 7, 2005 1:21 UTC (Thu) by darthmdh (guest, #8032) [Link]

No, it was developed because Larry had a passion for SCM tools, and a heck of a lot of experience in writing them, and wanted to contribute a decent one to the community and hopefully get rich on the side ;)

It was not developed specifically for Linus. When Linus adopted it for the kernel, it already had a rapidly expanding userbase. Bitmover promised and delivered free support to him, no doubt knowing full well that the Linux kernel is the dream test case for any distributed SCM development - an arseload of developers and others spread all over the planet and an extremely active tree with many branches. That being proactive in supporting Linus here would improve BitKeeper is a given.

Bitmover also had at that time (and I assume still do) many commerical clients paying for support - they didn't have to give Linus any help whatsoever - but what software engineer in their right mind is going to forsake the dream test case for their pet project? Especially one mutually beneficial?

I can't recall any options of note being added since the adoption by Linus, just a lot of polishing in the backend (eg improving the protocol to make updates much faster). But maybe my own use of SCM functionality isn't deep enough to notice everything so I'll believe you.

Bitmover already used revenue from support contracts and custom consulting to pay for development costs (like most software houses) and I assume this will go on regardless.

I know I've been somewhat negative in a few posts on the various articles in LWN on this topic today, I guess the bright side to the story is that BitKeeper is still around, still the best, there's a very good incentive for Open Source SCM alternatives to get their acts together (adoption by Linus Torvalds and possibly hundreds of thousands of others), and the usual anti-BK trolls now have to crawl back under their bridges and find something else to whine about meaning we won't see them for a while hopefully. I especially like the new kick in the pants for SCM developers which will hopefully benefit the open source community, and the opportunity to look at eg Monotone and Bazaar, neither of which I'd heard of until now. What can I say, I like new toys :)

This is a textbook case for a business school

Posted Apr 7, 2005 1:37 UTC (Thu) by hppnq (subscriber, #14462) [Link]

Nobody claims BitKeeper was written especially for Linus, so I don't really see your point.

I agree with the kick though. ;-)

This is a textbook case for a business school

Posted Apr 7, 2005 2:26 UTC (Thu) by darthmdh (guest, #8032) [Link]

Nobody claims BitKeeper was written especially for Linus, so I don't really see your point.

dlang wrote in the comment I replied to, in fact, opened it with "actually the real story is that bitkeeper was developed FOR Linus to use. that's what shifted Larry from his current projects to full-time work on SCM's."

I was addressing this mis-truth (apologies for not quoting it originally)

This is a textbook case for a business school

Posted Apr 7, 2005 9:04 UTC (Thu) by hppnq (subscriber, #14462) [Link]

See your original post, to which dlang responded... There are many accounts of how BitKeeper was developed and adjusted to Linus' needs (google for "Larry McVoy Linus Torvalds Dave Miller").

This is a textbook case for a business school

Posted Apr 7, 2005 6:41 UTC (Thu) by irios (guest, #19838) [Link]

> And now, thanks to these thieves, we now no longer have a free BK tool.

What exactly makes these people thieves that makes the Samba or NTFS teams heroes? After all they are all reverse-engineering proprietary protocols for their perceived benefit of the free software community.

Are we all thieves, in your eyes? You too?

This is a textbook case for a business school

Posted Apr 7, 2005 20:20 UTC (Thu) by kasperd (guest, #11842) [Link]

> Larry often encourages the development of a free alternative.

If he really wanted to encourage the development of a free alternative, he should have removed those restrictions about using BitKeeper and working on a competing product. Not that they were ever as legally binding as Larry McVoy thought.

How were people supposed to write a competing product without trying out BitKeeper to find out what they were competing against. Don't you think BitMover tried the alternatives as well so they knew what they were competing against?

Is there really any business (software or not) where developers don't take a look on competing products to know what they are up against?

This is a textbook case for a business school

Posted Apr 8, 2005 2:37 UTC (Fri) by darthmdh (guest, #8032) [Link]

There's a difference between developing a competing product, and producing a clone of an existing one.

The first has a future and is beneficial to society. The second is just pointless Xeroxing. What Larry was trying to prevent was the second, and he has every right to do so.

Cloning is stupid. How does the adage go; "those who do not learn from the past are doomed to reimplement it... poorly". If you're simply cloning something else you will always be at least one step behind, usually more. Take a look at all the OSS projects that attempt to imitate Microsoft Windows. They came close to getting Win95 and then Microsoft come out with the re-designed XP. They might come close to getting XP, but then Microsoft will come out with Longhorn. If you're constantly chasing someone else's coattails, you will always be behind them. Less than them. Worse than them. Also, all you achieve is to confuse and distract people, maybe divert funds from those actually creating/innovating (those being cloned) to the undeserved (the cheap knockoffs), create division and fanatical polarisation causing harm, not good.

Competition is meant to encourage innovation. Doing something new. And by something new, its not just change some keywords and remove some functionality (like Java/C# over C++). It's more like Lisp versus C (bad choice in examples, but I hope my point is clear). Solve problems that either haven't been solved before, or solve them in an unarguably better fashion, or at least different enough that there's some kind of mass appeal (functional versus procedural versus object-oriented versus ...). Raise the bar.

Notice how Microsoft never went after projects duplicating their UI efforts - because a) it shows flattery towards their UI (ie, there's good stuff there people want to copy) and b) they remain the ones out in front. But they did go after projects that did things better (such as Samba, which not only fixed bugs in the SMB protocol but ran on hardware existing in peoples networks that Windows could not run on, meaning people could stick with what they knew and loved - Microsoft's competitors (UNIX vendors) - not needing to not only purchase Windows licenses but even equipment Windows was capable of running on, dissolving future migration paths to their cruddier OS).

This is a textbook case for a business school

Posted Apr 10, 2005 10:56 UTC (Sun) by peet (guest, #29170) [Link]

Cloning is not always stupid. The classic example is when you have an unmaintained product (possibly, but not necessarily, closed-source). OpenCVS is just one example, but there are many. You might be reaching a bit to describe OpenOffice.org as a clone of Microsoft Office, but you wouldn't be reaching too far.

Even if the being-cloned product is actively maintained, cloning is not necessarily stupid. If it's unmaintained - and especially if it's closed-source - cloning can be an extremely useful thing to do.

This is tridge :)

Posted Apr 7, 2005 9:29 UTC (Thu) by gvy (guest, #11981) [Link]

It's not about "Windows GUI" -- it's about Samba and Andrew Tridgell.

http://kerneltrap.org/node/4966