Bitkeeper after the storm - Part 1 (NewsForge)
Posted May 12, 2004 1:30 UTC (Wed) by
iabervon (subscriber, #722)
In reply to:
Bitkeeper after the storm - Part 1 (NewsForge) by spot
Parent article:
Bitkeeper after the storm - Part 1 (NewsForge)
But he's also taking the opposite stance: he's providing closed software
for 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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