Oh, get a hobby

Posted Jan 29, 2006 16:17 UTC (Sun) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091) [Link]

I'm busy riding around on my tractor. It's way more fun than arguing with a bunch of geeks.

Oh, so now riding around on a tractor is fun? Obviously not so much, since you keep coming for more.

We're not Microsoft, we weren't trying to rip people off, we were busting our asses to help the open source community.

You are much worse than Microsoft. With them you know what their true position is; but BitMover were posing as friends when you are not. The only good you have ever done is to show further proof that freedom is more important in the long run than convenience.

We gave away our products, we provided free support and machines (at a cost of $500K/year) in good faith.

You gave free hosting and a lease on your program in exchange for visibility. No good faith required.

All we asked was that people respected our IP, which, BTW, is exactly what the GPL asks.

Not in the least. The GPL is designed to let you know what your software does and how to modify it; not to protect any "IP". In fact, Stallman and the FSF have repeatedly repudiated the concept of "intellectual property". Your goals were to forbid people from learning what your software did, i.e. to keep your knowledge to yourselves.

Just to show you the difference: if your goals were really the same as those of the GPL, you could have used it to publish your software under it. Sounds ridiculous, doesn't it? There you have it. Different requirements, different goals.

The fact that few of you see the difference isn't really a good thing for open source, this has been a very visible thing and it doesn't show the open source community in a good light.

It's good to have some common ground. The software libre community could not care less: as we learn to disentangle ourselves from the prostituted concept which is "open source", events like this (and people like you) help us see why freedom is important after all. The "open source community" increasingly appears in a bad light to us too.

The software libre (or free software) community comes out with an A of this mess. In a few weeks there was a good enough free replacement of an expensive proprietary tool which was causing controversy and division; it was adopted and used and expanded upon, showcasing the strengths of free software. It was as if BitKeeper had never existed.

Like it or not, if you dig into the facts we were an excellent member of the community and the community crapped on us.

You can keep saying it but that does not make it true: you were not an excellent member of the "community". In fact you were not even a member. Witness your long term contributions: right now, what have we gained from you? A saner Linus, according to you; but other kernel maintainers never used BitKeeper and managed to get their work done and keep their alternative trees. In fact you may have delayed his work on git several years, causing a lasting fragmentation in the free code management panorama. This suited you well, which shows your true colors.

So you gave the Linux kernel some free hosting and a lease on your program. In truth, when you got tired of the "community" you took your ball home and left nothing of value. In contrast, look at Tridgell's work: they are lasting contributions which are there for everyone to use freely -- and by the way are essential tools in any admin's box. BitKeeper is an anecdote.

If you want people with money to help you, this story is not going to help that goal.

Sorry, we don't need no sugar daddies. We (and this is a rhetorical "we") want to work with serious people who have something useful to offer, be it code, hardware, bandwidth or jobs. With no strings attached; otherwise the whole "freedom" thing would make little sense. Luckily there is no shortage of "people with money" (even, you know, big companies) who understand what is needed. As to the rest they can go away and count their millions, ride their tractors or whatever they do. No hard feelings.

Posted Jan 31, 2006 1:20 UTC (Tue) by rickmoen (subscriber, #6943) [Link]

Larry wrote:

But since I'm here what the hey. I'm sure you'll flame me into next week but don't expect a reply, OK?

Larry, there's certainly no call to flame you. That is the last thing from my mind. You and your firm have a fine product that deserves every bit of the success it's been gaining against ClearCase and the like.

At the same time, you are publicly impugning the integrity of one of the most thoroughly ethical people most of us know, and basically asking us to take your accusation of illegality on pure faith, since you are unwilling to litigate it (but glad to hurl mud in public that you decline to back up). I'm sorry, but that's neither convincing nor acceptable, and in fact is outright offensive.

People think that the reverse engineering of BitKeeper is the same as the reverse engineering of the SMB stuff. That's not at all true.

What seems to have happened was Tridge studying BitKeeper's publicly observable behaviour to create an open-source, interoperable client, SourcePuller — which he did. You spent a lot of time decrying it, and calling it unethical. When people question you how on earth Tridge writing an interoperable client from his own efforts could be unethical, you assert that he did it through unlawful means — but then decline to put your money where your mouth is and prove it in court, preferring to float loose charges in public where you don't have to prove them.

And meanwhile, you also digress onto non-sequitur justifications about how it's wrongful because your firm provided this-and-that generous benefits to the community. Stipulating those benefits, you have nonetheless ducked the question and conveniently changed the subject.

The accusations, given your declining to prove them, do you little credit. Nobody's flaming you, but, again, shame on you for that sort of behaviour, which is no way for the head of a serious business to conduct himself.

Rick Moen
rick@linuxmafia.com