Bitkeeper, the universe, and everything

Bitkeeper, the universe, and everything

Posted Feb 24, 2004 23:10 UTC (Tue) by piman (subscriber, #8957)
In reply to: Bitkeeper, the universe, and everything by lm
Parent article: subversion 1.0 is released

Hi Larry,

You put the rest of us in something of an unfair position. The BitKeeper License (as I find it at http://www.bitkeeper.com/bkl.txt) clause 3c prevents those developing products similar to BK (i.e. other SCMs or SCM-related software) from using BitKeeper under its free license. Thus, the Subversion, Arch, or Monotone developers can't try out BitKeeper to compare features, speed, and so on. Whereas since those are all released under a free software license, you are free to try them out and evaluate them even though you are competing with them.

Thus, no free SCM developers can provide a fully informed (if biased) critique of BitKeeper in the same way you can provide a fully informed (if biased) critique of Arch or Subversion. If you are so sure about BitKeeper's capabilities compared to the competition, perhaps you should remove clause 3c.

Your baiting comment about compilers is disappointing; given the amount of software development you've done, you should know better than to provide such a useless benchmark.

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