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Bitkeeper after the storm - Part 1 (NewsForge)Bitkeeper after the storm - Part 1 (NewsForge)Posted May 11, 2004 22:22 UTC (Tue) by spot (subscriber, #15640)Parent article: Bitkeeper after the storm - Part 1 (NewsForge) "We run our business on free software, we develop our product with free software..." But the end result is still un-free software. If he was serious about believing in the merits of free software, we'd have freely licensed source code for bitkeeper today. I'm a firm believer that all applications have a time and place, but McVoy seems to be a bit of a hypocrite here. Personally, I'd have liked for him to have been asked why bitkeeper remains closed-source to this day. And yeah, I suspect I know the answer too (Profit!).
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Bitkeeper after the storm - Part 1 (NewsForge) Posted May 11, 2004 22:44 UTC (Tue) by vmole (subscriber, #111) [Link] Larry has repeatedly answered why BitKeeper isn't free software: he has to meet a payroll. You may not like that answer. But to develop the software he wanted to develop, that's the approach he took. He claims that BitKeeper couldn't have been developed as free software. You and anyone else are allowed to prove him wrong, of course; so far, no one has. (And, no, sorry, CVS/SVN/Arch/monotone/yadayadayada are not equivalent to BitKeeper.) Larry has not always handled it well. I think the "we can change the free-use license anytime" approach is an incredibly bad idea, he should pick a license and stick to it. But the funny thing is, if he had never released BitKeeper under any license except a standard proprietary one, he'd have taken a hell of a lot less crap.
Bitkeeper after the storm - Part 1 (NewsForge) Posted May 13, 2004 4:55 UTC (Thu) by bignose (subscriber, #40) [Link] > Larry has repeatedly answered why BitKeeper isn't free software: he has to> meet a payroll. Then he should not also be saying "we'd be doing it even if there was no benefit to us." He can't have it both ways, and his attempt to do so is what earns him his bad reputation. > if he had never released BitKeeper under any license except a standard Exactly. He takes crap not only for releasing non-free software, but much worse for pretending that to do so is *helping* free software. It doesn't, and his posture that he wants to help free software while at the same time making his main offering a non-free application whose license actively discourages the production of other free software, is hypocrisy.
Bitkeeper after the storm - Part 1 (NewsForge) Posted May 11, 2004 23:19 UTC (Tue) by havoc (guest, #2261) [Link] Why is it that Free Software zealots feel the need to force their religion on the rest of us? I don't get it. I like Free Software. I love it! I benefit from it daily, but I have bills to pay, and the GPL projects I've contributed have failed to return even a single line of code from the community, but people are more than happy to use my products without contributing so much as a “thank you” note. On the other hand, the code I've kept closed has allowed me to keep the bills paid.Believe me, I'd love to see the same level of success that MySQL and SleepyCat enjoy, but let's all face it, not every Free project will attain that level of financial success, and some may some day. In the mean time, please let us give back to the community as we are able, and don't condemn us for doing the best we can.
Bitkeeper after the storm - Part 1 (NewsForge) Posted May 11, 2004 23:57 UTC (Tue) by spot (subscriber, #15640) [Link] I don't consider myself a zealot (advocate, yes), but realize that if every software developer took the Bitkeeper stance (use free software to make closed software), there wouldn't be any free software.I believe that good software stands on its own merits, and that it doesn't need to be closed to have a revenue model. I'm not disagreeing that Bitkeeper one of the best revisioning systems out there, I just think that it seems somewhat hypocritical to talk about how much benefit you gain from free software in developing closed software. Then again, I'm probably also an idealist. :)
Bitkeeper after the storm - Part 1 (NewsForge) Posted May 12, 2004 1:30 UTC (Wed) by iabervon (subscriber, #722) [Link] But he's also taking the opposite stance: he's providing closed softwarefor people to use to make free software. The fact that Linus is happy and productive (and I well remember when he was failing to scale) is a bigger benefit to free software than many free software projects provide. Instead of writing free software and selling services, he writes closed software and provides free services to free software. I personally think that he is wrong to prohibit developers of other version control systems from using the gratis version of bitkeeper, however. He's said that he couldn't have gotten bitkeeper right as an open source project, because it took a lot of concerted effort before it was sufficiently useful that it would have attracted a team. But if the problem is that hard, he shouldn't worry about competition, and if it's not, he's doomed anyway. Limiting who can use the gratis version just makes it less appealing to project leaders and less convenient for them, which in turn reduces the number of developers exposed to it, and reduces the market for the commercial version.
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