LWN: Comments on "An Interview with Tom Lord of Arch (O'ReillyNet)"

Unable to buy a copy of BK

djao — 2004-11-25T18:45:23+00:00

Larry,

I freely admit that I am not at all involved with or affected by anything related to bitkeeper, but even as a detached party, your license shifts do worry me.

Two years ago you said, or at least strongly implied, that BKCL had no non-compete clause. In fact you even specifically mentioned that BKCL did not, in order to defend yourself against the (at the time) controversial notion of BKL having a non-compete clause.

Now we find that not only the free users but also even the commercial users of BK are not permitted to develop competing software. Can you imagine (say) Microsoft refusing to license Windows to any person developing competing OSs, or to any company employing any person developing competing OSs?

That is EVIL.

You can't claim on the one hand that the no-reverse-engineering clause already prohibits competing against you, and on the other hand refuse to sell BK to competitors. This very position is a contradiction in terms -- if the clause is sufficient protection, then why do you feel the need to further protect yourself with discriminatory sales tactics?

I can understand your logic in not making BK free software, but I cannot understand your logic in refusing to sell BK to competitors. The no-reverse-engineering clause already provides you enough protection. Any incremental gain to BK from sales discrimination is not worth committing such an evil act, if only for public relations reasons.

Following up after a day in the shop

hppnq — 2004-10-01T10:18:09+00:00

Larry, thanks for your time explaining all this. It is too bad that an Open Source business model doesn't cut it for you, I really believe that you are missing out on a lot of the good stuff that Open Source can do for you. But I am aware that you know this. ;-)

So, I wish you all the best! Thanks again.

Following up after a day in the shop

lm — 2004-10-01T01:40:38+00:00

My pleasure, hopefully it's been helpful. It's definitely not an easy path that we've choosen, lots of people are very unhappy BK is used in the open source world at all, they view it as a failure of the open source model and a very visible failure at that. I can easily see that people would take the position that they should use the open source stuff and if it isn't good enough then they should fix it. Makes perfect sense, I'd argue the same thing in their shoes.

However, this particular product space is really difficult. Every engineer thinks they can do a better job in a few weeks with some scripts and CVS. Unfortunately, that's just not even close to being true. I've done this before and I knew how much work it was before I started again. And to tell the truth, I had a little of that "oh, this will be easy" feeling. BitMover was created to do Linux clusters, not source management. I told my people "we just have to hack out this little source management tool for Linus and then we'll get on the clusters, OK?" Yeah, right. It became clear in about of 6 months that this was a far bigger effort than I had anticipated and we had to have a business model or we'd never get to anything good.

If there had been any way I could have done this as a GPLed product I would have. I get it. I get it more than most of the people flaming me. But even if I were wealthy enough to do this for free (which I'm not) it wouldn't have worked. This job is a lot bigger than me, a lot bigger. I needed help and in order to attract that help I needed something more than my stellar personality and the possibility of helping the OSS world. People wanted to get paid, they wanted stock options, and they wanted those options to be potentially worth something. You just can't make that happen with an open source product. But what about Red Hat? Red Hat isn't an open source product, it is about 1000 open source products, and Red Hat wrote less than 1% of those products. Red Hat is a packaging company by and large. We aren't. We have one product and the support model doesn't work for us, the packaging model doesn't work for us, that was obvious. We needed an answer which generated enough revenue to pay us to make a better product for you. And for our commercial customers.

We had to have a commercial model that generated revenue. It sucks, all of us would rather be hacking away on GPLed source, that would be cool. But we have to eat, we have to support our families, and most importantly, we have to do a good job for you. We simply can't do that with an open source business model.

Unable to buy a copy of BK

lm — 2004-10-01T01:04:49+00:00

Yes, BK can handle 1500 users working on the same source base, or pretty close to it. There are about that many people checking stuff into the linux kernel trees. You can check it out on www.bkbits.net but truth in advertising, not all of those users listed are actually using BK, some of them are proxied into the system via patches imported by someone else.

That said, I'm pretty sure there are >1000 actual BK users working on the Linux kernel tree directly. BK uses a lease based model for its licensing which means that those users connect to openlogging.org once a month to get a lease (this all happens in the background, nobody realizes it is there, which is - in my opinion - how a license server should work, I'm not a flexlm fan). We can correlate those with the stuff on bkbits.net and openlogging.org and a 1000 looks to be a lower bound. I think it's quite a bit more than but I haven't worked through all the data to be sure (we have many many GB of logs). So 1500 all on one source base? I don't think we have any commercial users with that many users all working on the same source base, that's pretty atypical anyway, source is usually broken up into chunks with different groups working on different chunks.

Following up after a day in the shop

rgoates — 2004-09-30T17:07:41+00:00

Larry, thanks for taking the time for this discussion. I've found it
very educational.

An Interview with Tom Lord of Arch (O'ReillyNet)

hppnq — 2004-09-29T05:29:20+00:00

Oh well. ;-)

An Interview with Tom Lord of Arch (O'ReillyNet)

dvdeug — 2004-09-29T02:17:46+00:00

The free software community is a collection of people who work on free software, by whatever means. People who actively discourage other people from working on free software aren't part of that community. It's not good behavior for a member of that community to encourage the use of free software, either. I realize there's more than one definition of the community, but that's part of mine.

I suggest you follow your own advice. You use smileys to hide your attacks; they don't help. I read your comments, and insinuating that I don't is rude. If you want me to read your comments in a friendly light, I suggest you give me the same courtesy.

An Interview with Tom Lord of Arch (O'ReillyNet)

snitm — 2004-09-28T14:48:16+00:00

I think you read into my statements a bit too much. My point about capitalism is that he'll be just fine in that he and BitMover are providing a product people are willing to buy (akin to your "sensible people").

Now if we were to take your GM vs Ford analogy a bit further in the context of BitKeeper.. GM and Ford will gladly sell cars to each other; even if their intent is to evaluate/use their respective technological gains to compete with each other.

An Interview with Tom Lord of Arch (O'ReillyNet)

lm — 2004-09-28T14:36:46+00:00

Some people have no sense of humor, I was joking. I have a wife and two kids and a VW Vanagon. The only car money I want is money to get a paint job for the van and a new engine.

If you think I'm in the SCM business for the money you are mistaken. Sure, I want money as much as the next guy but I've learned you don't need insane amounts of money to be happy. In fact, if your house is paid off, you can happily live the rest of your life on $3M or so. If you were careful and lived someplace cheaper you could do it on less. Buying a porsche != careful.

On the other hand, the mental image of sprinkling shavings while driving might bear some thought. I don't think a porsche is the answer, I think you'd want something like an old beat up yellow schoolbus. Then you bolt down the machines to the floor, open the back door, get the wife to drive, and the shavings will just naturally fly out the door into the porsche which is trying to pass us.

"A joke, son, I say, I say, I say, a joke. Are you listening to me, son?"

Following up after a day in the shop

lolando — 2004-09-28T08:07:08+00:00

There's a difference between "helping the FLOSS community", which I think nobody can reasonably deny BK the software and BM the provider of hosting are doing, and "being part of the FLOSS community", which is a criterion only the license can fulfill.

An Interview with Tom Lord of Arch (O'ReillyNet)

darthmdh — 2004-09-28T07:55:57+00:00

Some people have goals and work for them. Other people want everything for nothing. I think this is the distinction being drawn here. What licenses like the GPL protect is "freedom". Some people believe that if they purchase something, they can do whatever they like (within the bounds of the law) with that thing. For example, if I buy a car from some General Motors company I can drive it wherever I please, not just on roads sponsored by General Motors. I can take out the 2 litre, 4 cylinder combustion engine that came with it and replace it with a battery-powered "whipper snipper" engine. Or a jet turbine. Or a french fry.
Don't try to bring capitalism vs communism into this, its irrelevent. The mistaken people are akin to those who would claim they will never drive a Ford - because its not made by General Motors - and they expect GM to provide them with vehicles free of charge, with insurance, registration, and all fuel and maintenance costs, forever, included. They don't honestly care about cars or driving when it comes down to it, and most of them would advocate GM-only roads. Sensible people would obtain the vehicle that best suited their needs, would happily recompense the manufacturer for the time and effort they saved them in not having to do everything necessary to produce roadworthy vehicles themselves, and would go to the service station to perform the necessary ongoing costs of having a vehicle in the first place. Claiming the GPL is anything related to the first crowd is insulting.

Unable to buy a copy of BK

Talli — 2004-09-28T03:50:05+00:00

Nix,

I am starting a company with Tom Lord to develop a company around GNU arch. If you would like to chat about how GNU arch can be used at your dev shop, we would be delighted to discuss that with you.

You can reach me at talli-at-seyza.com

Thanks and looking forward to chatting.

Talli

An Interview with Tom Lord of Arch (O'ReillyNet)

snitm — 2004-09-28T02:38:10+00:00

I understand you all want everything to be free, I want a porsche.
Well that makes it all too clear now doesn't it... you should've just said 'screw you guys I want [more] money'. Capitalism is on your side, so I'd say go buy your hard earned porsche and let your mill ride shotgun... and sprinkle metal shavings from the car as you drive.

Following up after a day in the shop

lm — 2004-09-27T23:58:27+00:00

The mill is way nifty and if you are local to the Bay Area drop me a mail and you can come over and get covered in shavings too :)

Following up after a day in the shop

lm — 2004-09-27T23:48:14+00:00

Hi Kevin,

It's a pleasure to actually have a conversation rather than a flamefest, thanks for doing so, I mean it.

On the topic of excluding people, this is just FUD raised by people who want everything in the world to be GPLed. Other than Zenaan, in our entire history I am aware of exactly one other person who we excluded, Ben Collins, and we later worked out an agreement with him and he's off using BK.

It's true that we could use the license as a baseball bat but it's also true that we don't do that. Lots of people at Red Hat use BK and have for years, in spite of the fact that in theory they are not allowed to do so. If one of them started working on arch and we saw arch getting BK features one by one then we might do something about it. But they haven't and so we don't bother them.

Bottom line: all the fuss that has been made about the non-compete clause excluding people is just FUD by the GPL police. All sorts of people use BK, we've counted more than 10,000 active branches of the Linux kernel in BK and even if each developer had 10 branches that's still 1,000 developers. I'm sure you could make a case that we could exclude lots of those developers but that's missing the point. The point is that we don't. Not unless one of them tells us that they are going off to copy BK. I wasn't involved with Zenaan but I got the impression he didn't leave us any choice.

As for pulling the license, again, we could but we haven't. What the license says has to do with support, not beating people up. We have more than 50,000 free users - that's a lot of support and as others have pointed out, we take support very seriously. The deal we want is that you stay current so that we don't have to handle the same old bug 50,000 times. The license says you have to upgrade when we issue a new release that has regression tests that wouldn't pass on the older release[s] (which is pretty much true every release, we have a very extensive regression test suite). While we have the legal right to force you to upgrade, we have never done so. People are aware of our reasons for wanting you to stay current and by and large they respect that.

It's worth noting that all the FUD spread about our license is just that, FUD. While we believe we can make our license stick if need be the truth is that if the license is genuinely unreasonable you can take us to court and win, the courts will side with you if we are being jerks. That doesn't mean you get to win because you think I'm a jerk, it means you get to win if we are not allowing you fair use or reasonable enjoyment or whatever the legal mumbo jumbo is.

Finally, your last comment is the one I'd really like to address. It's most unfortunate that you feel that way because BK exists simply to help the Linux effort, specifically Linus. Joe Buck suggested that I did that as a marketing move. There are two flaws with that theory: it doesn't account for the 5 or 6 years that I worked with Linus on Linux before writing a line of code on BitKeeper and it doesn't account for the fact that I couldn't market my way out of a wet paper bag. Look at me, I can show up with a free $100 bill and manage to piss you off in the process of giving it to you. And I'm the guy that came up with this brilliant marketing plan? If I'm a marketing genius my goal must be to piss off the world because I do a great job of it. Face it, the "BK + Linux == marketing" theory doesn't hold water and anyone who has been around for the last ten years knows that. The idea of me in marketing is a joke, a bad joke.

BK was created to help you. I'm not looking for your thanks or gratitude but I am looking for you to realize that what I'm telling you is the truth. I picked the path where I could make the most positive difference to the open source world. I'm a good engineer, maybe a great engineer, but there is no way that I'm as good as Linus+Alan+Dave+Greg+Andrew+.... If I can help 1000 engineers be 5% more productive that's a 50x more good than I could have done by writing kernel code. You don't like that BK isn't GPLed. What you don't get is that a GPLed answer wouldn't have helped. It costs way too much money to do something like BK, there is more than 100 man years of top quality, full time, 60-80 hours/week, engineering in BK. You can wait for an open source replacement but you will wait for a long, long time. On the other hand, BK is here right now, helping, and has been for years. And there is no replacement for it in sight.

I've been saying the same things for years, this stuff is hard, it costs a lot of money to get it right, and there is a big payoff for the end users. Look at http://www.bitkeeper.com/press/2004-03-17.html and you can see the payoff, nobody disputes that. So *you* are benefitting right now by the use of BK on the Linux kernel, on MySQL, etc. Maybe some day there will be a suitable GPLed replacement but right now there isn't. And BK is helping the development of lots and lots of open source.

Can you see how perhaps I might not agree with your view that we're not part of the FLOSS community? Maybe you still disagree with me but that's not going to help you, it's going to hurt you. You are rejecting people who are trying to help because they don't want to help in your narrow definition of help. That's unfortunate.

Any content to this interview?

scripter — 2004-09-27T20:21:40+00:00

Tom Lord has been fairly abrasive in his criticism of subversion in the past, although he's improved somewhat in the past year. While he knows why he dislikes the design decisions of subversion, he often has difficulty articulating his thoughts in a coherent and amicable way.

The up-and-coming version (already available in beta form) of Subversion resolves some of the current administration problems of the BDB back end with a new file storage system called FSFS, written largely by Greg Hudson, I believe.

If you want distributed Subversion, try using the SVK project, which is built on top of subversion. http://svk.elixus.org/

As for me, I look forward to the time when tla works well on Windows and has some of its current warts cleaned up. In the meantime, I'll keep recommending Subversion.

Following up after a day in the shop

kevinbsmith — 2004-09-27T19:39:12+00:00

Larry,

I appreciate your thoughtful response. Other people have already addressed most of the points, but I wanted to add just a couple notes.

Perhaps Bitmover doesn't change the wording of the license that often, although yearly significant changes seem somewhat frequent to me. However, it seems to me (and I could be wrong) that the interpretation of the license changes more often than that. It seems like every few months I hear about another person or group who is somehow excluded from being able to use BK. For example, I was not previously aware that small businesses who employ advocates of FLOSS BK competitors would be denied the option to purchase BK licenses.

The scariest part of the licensing is that someone who already has a license can have it suddenly pulled from them. With most software, once you have a license for a particular version, you can at least continue using that version forever, as long as you obey the license you accepted when you started using the software. With BK, it seems that is not the case, based on what I have read.

As far as your personal FLOSS contributions: I have not followed your career outside Bitmover, so I was unaware of your GPL work. For whatever true free/open software you have written, tested, or documented: Thank you. Seriously. And thank you for doing what you think is best for the Linux kernel. In contexts other than BK, you may indeed be a valued member of the FLOSS community, and I did not intend to take that away from you.

So let me rephrase my statement as: I still believe that in the context of BK, Bitmover is not part of the FLOSS community, any more than other proprietary companies who merely provide gratis tools (and there are many). In fact, most such companies do not discriminate against specific FLOSS contributors or advocates.

An Interview with Tom Lord of Arch (O'ReillyNet)

hppnq — 2004-09-27T16:34:41+00:00

Again, relax please. Take the time to read the comments. If I didn't make myself clear, please let me know and I'll try to express myself better, okay? But don't twist my (or someone else's) words or insinuate something that has never been said -- I won't respond to that.

What I am trying to get through to you, is that the Open Source community is more than just a bunch of people who release software under the GPL. There are very valid contributions one can make, that do not directly involve developing free software: allowing people to use your hardware, bandwidth, time, intelligence, yes even your proprietary software, in order to further the development of Open Source. At least, that's the way I see it. You are free to have your own opinion.

But even by the narrowest of definitions, I would consider Larry part of the Open Source community, because of past contributions and his current involvement; I would even consider BitKeeper to be part of its infrastructure, if only because lots of kernel developers use it to develop one of Open Source's flagships. (There are many more Open Source projects that use it though.)

Mind you: you may not like BitKeeper's part in Open Source development, but it is a fact.

So, while you are very much entitled to disagree with me on anything you like, I found the last paragraph your top comment extremely rude, unnecessary and not at all representative of any community I would like to think I am part of. I've tried to tell you that in, I think, quite a reasonable way.

Now we can argue at length about who said what and how it is to be interpreted, but we'd be boring the pants off of every other visitor of this page. I could also post the links to my direct responses to Larry on this very page, but that would be silly, right?

An Interview with Tom Lord of Arch (O'ReillyNet)

dvdeug — 2004-09-27T15:54:37+00:00

If telling people off because they don't do exactly what you want is hardly a discussion, what exactly are you doing? I've never told him what to do; I've merely explained my viewpoint. Larry has complained about people taking advantage of their freedoms; that could be construed as "did not do exactly as he would like them to". Why is it that you don't respond to him?

It's not about who has contributed more to Open Source (aka the dick length war). I respect what he's done in the past, but he's not a member of the community as long as he's wearing the BitKeeper hat. There are many free software programmers who also write proprietary software, they just don't claim that the free software community should respect them for that.

An Interview with Tom Lord of Arch (O'ReillyNet)

hppnq — 2004-09-27T12:43:27+00:00

Exactly.

The interesting thing, of course, is that Larry's problem is usually solved by patenting the invention. If the patent system hadn't been so horribly abused, this could have been a good, pragmatic -- but not perfect -- solution to the problem.

So let's consider the chances of someone building a "better BitKeeper" with patents out of the way.

First, the scenario in which BitKeeper is released under the GPL. The way I see it, all Open Source developers who merely care about a SCM system would probably contribute to it, rather than taking the source and cloning it, or using vital parts of it in a new system. Really, most people have got better things to do than to write another major piece of software. Apart from that, it is not that simple to rip off an Open Source project. Why doesn't Hans Reiser fork the Linux kernel and be done with the constant hassle over ReiserFS? Because it just would not work. The Linux kernel has plenty of momentum, and that is without any corporate backing. The pure power of Linux is *exactly* the fact that the development process involves many, many people contributing to it (partly because of BitKeeper ;-). Given the current state of affairs in the SCM world, BitKeeper would not have a lot of trouble attracting committed, enthusiastic community of developers and users.

That leaves the people who have got the intention and the means to grab BitKeeper, slap the name BitSneaker on it and sell it as if it were their own. Quite possibly the intention is there, but are the means too? Because BitKeeper is released under the GPL in this scenario, BitSneaker would have to be Open Source too -- so at least the competition would be fair in that respect. But as long as BitKeeper is backed by enough Open Source developers, the BitSneaker project is doomed: BitKeeper will continue to become better and better and therefore alone more interesting to customers.

The second scenario is, of course, the one where BitKeeper is released under a closed license. Ignore the fact that people can use it free of charge -- Bitmover has made sure that anyone with an interest in SCM systems can never contribute anything to BitKeeper. Now, all the burden of developing it is on Bitmover's shoulders. There are plenty of developers with a need for a good SCM system, but they cannot use BitKeeper. Inevitably, this problem will be solved by those people, be it by contributing to arch, cvs or starting from scratch. It may take a couple of years, but they will get there. At that point, BitKeeper has an Open Source competitor for sure. People were laughting at OpenOffice two or three years ago, and now we see Microsoft releasing the code to Office to selected parties.

Apart from the Open Source developers, who just want a working SCM system, we still have those who might have the intention of making money off of BitKeeper technology. The fact that the license says "Thou shalt not poke" will not stop them from trying to see how BitKeeper ticks, and it will probably not hold in court anyway (IANAL ;-) if there is no evidence of line-by-line copying and something like a patent that protects BitKeeper's internals. It will, of course, be more difficult to extract the interesting bits from BitKeeper, but it will not be impossible. Even worse, competitors might get away with an inferior product that looks like it does the same thing (think VHS versus Betamax) because no one will be able to look at the internals of both programs.

That's a long story, and it's not even complete. ;-) Of course it is biased, but in a fair way, I would hope -- the bias is away from common notions, like the one that Open Source is easy to rip off and closed source is not.

An Interview with Tom Lord of Arch (O'ReillyNet)

Wol — 2004-09-27T11:32:14+00:00

One point to bear in mind.

Larry has said, right from the get-go, that the only thing he was opposed to was someone using BitKeeper to "build a better BitKeeper". This appears to be a perfect case of exactly that scenario.

While I'm concerned about the "we won't even sell you a licence" aspect, a scenario like this should have been forseen because Larry has been saying this sort of thing for ever. BitKeeper has a lot of "trade secrets" and other stuff in it that Larry wants to protect. Can you blame him for not wanting people to lift that and put it into "Free" version-control systems.

And as he has said in the past, the trouble with GPL'ing it is that it would cut off a large chunk of his revenue. Without that revenue, he couldn't afford to pay people to work on it. And without a paid development staff, new development would hit a brick wall - I know - I'm trying to build a Free clone of an existing system, and without time (which needs money) progress is horribly slow :-(

Cheers,
Wol

Following up after a day in the shop

lolando — 2004-09-27T11:15:19+00:00

A few points:

> And the bit about me not being part of the open source community warrants
> comment. That hurts. I've been a long term member of this community [...]

Yeah, you as Larry McVoy, author of free tools at some point in time. I don't know them, but I have no reason to deny you any credit for them. You as BitKeeper's keeper seems to be a different matter.

> once upon a time BK was open source with a license that said "you can't
> remove the openlogging part"

Doesn't seem to be open source to me. Open source is not just about seeing the code. I agree people who did remove that stuff did violate the license, though, but don't call the license open source while it's not.

> BK exists to help the FLOSS community

The way I see it, BK exists to provide funding for BM, which in turn devotes resources to pay engineers to 1. improve BK, 2. provide support for it. BK helps (some) community members do stuff (the second S in FLOSS), but as far as I can see it doesn't help the "FLOS" part.

Oh, and refusing to sell a product to a customer (for whatever reason) is such a kind of "Uh, you what?" that it shouldn't be necessary, but you know us French, a law for everything and all, well, it's forbidden in France. Never thought that would have any actual influence on any but theoretical cases, seems I was wrong. Oh well. I suppose you'll have to do without the patronage of my (rather large) company then, as I've already written my first patch to Arch (and will probably write others).

Following up after a day in the shop

nix — 2004-09-27T10:57:20+00:00

(off-topic, but)

I personally think the mill's pretty nifty :)

Unable to buy a copy of BK

nix — 2004-09-27T10:47:05+00:00

They don't commit that often :) many of them are using it as a distribution mechanism.

But I guess it'll be SVN for now, anyway: it seems that `like CVS' is more important than I thought it was.

An Interview with Tom Lord of Arch (O'ReillyNet)

hppnq — 2004-09-27T10:40:59+00:00

Telling people off because they do not do exactly what you would like them to do is hardly a discussion. ;-)

Relax. Larry merely responded to a comment that involved him, he didn't ask for your opinion on his position in the Open Source community. If you disagree with him (and you've got plenty of reasons to do so), just stick to the facts. It might just be that he has contributed more to Open Source than you.

Following up after a day in the shop

hppnq — 2004-09-27T10:06:25+00:00

Larry, I'm with you on this one, setting aside some of the practical stuff (how you run your business is entirely up to you).

I think that it is a shame that releasing BitKeeper under the GPL does not work, and I think that members of the Open Source community should be able to discuss this problem from a pragmatic point of view. We're trying to solve a real problem here, and solving real problems usually calls for compromises. Stuffing Open Source down people's throats as an attempt to rid the world of non-free software (or at least the problems associated with it) is just not going to work. Nor is saying: forget the GPL because there are some people out there trying to rip me off. (They will rip you off anyway.)

I didn't mean you should just GPL BitKeeper, I was saying that there are already several hybrid solutions that might also work for you. Think Red Hat or MySQL. Companies are not waiting for a hairy hacker who might help solve a problem, they want the full blown support, added value and services. (Mind you: this is *not* my point of view, I think the hairy hacker solution is brilliant. ;-) It's not a question of giving everything away and hoping that some lunatic will still pay you for it -- it is a question of deciding exactly what it is you're selling. Given the fact that you want people to be able to use BitKeeper, and still make money off it, the hybrid model just seems to be the most appropriate.

Use the strength of the GPL. Your customers might be interested to know that, if you are gone or they want to switch to another system, they do not run the risk of losing their software, data, or investments therein. Like someone else said here, who needs another superior SCM system anyway, if we can have a GPL'ed BitKeeper? The risk that you lose against a competitor seems to be much higher if you don't GPL BitKeeper, because people will start scratching their itches.

(Not every avid Open Source supporter is a fanatic, by the way, though I imagine your path has crossed some real nutcases over the years. I would advise you to ignore them so we can have a normal discussion. There is no reason to throw at me what someone else might say or do. ;-)

Following up after a day in the shop

darthmdh — 2004-09-27T07:21:21+00:00

Bravo! When BK first appeared I loved the fact they made it open source, it meant if I ever found any bugs I could fix them and contribute this back, or merge in fixes from others without having to rely on a vendor release (since most commercial software houses like to roll up a bunch of stuff over time and their support track record was yet to be proven). This is what open source is all about. Not that you get something free of charge (which so many people mistakenly believe), or even that you can rip off other's ideas - essentially fork a codebase and try to "compete" (be it financially or simply in mindset). Of course, like most ventures there's always some village idiot who wants to spoil things for everyone else, and so it was with BK and Bitmover were forced to make it more and more closed. Unfortunately by some of the very people they were trying to help by having it free in the first place. People who want to rip off open source software simply for the credits are IMO no better than software pirates who want their credits on their 0-day warez. Open source is about improving the open source software, not providing 50 billion nearly-identical alternatives to what currently exists, with someone else's name/brand on them, and nothing improved that you would write home about.

I buy software because its a tool that helps me solve real problems. Little annoys me more than computers that make tasks slower than doing it manually - what's the point? Why should I bother with arch (for example) when 6 months down the track I'm still not able to do any useful work with it because I still don't understand how the heck it works, its poorly documented, the syntax is woeful and confusing, and the mailing lists are full of egotists that want to enforce this "little boys club" mentality? Bitkeeper had a bit of a learning curve (mainly getting my head around the ChangeSet versus revision thing - I was used to CVS and PRCS) but it was well documented and the support is amazing. And I say that as a gratis user - what they must do for their paying customers blows my mind. I deal with a lot of commercial vendors and there are few that come even close - to *paying* customers. That being said, to compare the two, BK improves my productivity and arch kills it dead and then some, when I'm writing code. I don't use an SCM tool because its a cool thing to do or the latest buzzword, or is licensed to me under the terms of the LLOTW (Libre License Of The Week). I want a tool that will assist me with the *real* task at hand - providing decent software in an agreeable timeframe. Same goes for Window Managers, editors, debugging tools, command shells, you name it.

Don't get peeved at Larry because he had to make his baby closed, get peeved at the morons who forced him to do that. They're the real enemy of open source.

Following up after a day in the shop

jan — 2004-09-27T06:24:14+00:00

Are you running a business or a charity?

You may have done alot of good for the community but that doesn't entitle your company to financial viability. It seems to me that you think it does.

Maybe you should have stayed at google, then you'd have a sustainable revenue stream to sink into a free BK ;-) It's sad that FLOSS sometimes bites the hand that feeds it, but I don't think aggressive licensing is the solution.

To Larry

hppnq — 2004-09-27T06:11:47+00:00

You make some good points, Joe, though I think Larry really has been looking for a solution that would allow him to both help Linus (for whatever reasons, obviously marketing was one of them) and make a lot of money out of his product. Righteousness doesn't have to enter the picture, we all try to look like we're right. ;-)

(Better stick to the facts. One of those is, that Larry has made several contributions to Open Source. Someone else made the observation that Larry is not a part of the Free Software community because of the BitKeeper license -- so much for righteousness. ;-)

To Larry

JoeBuck — 2004-09-27T05:15:10+00:00

What you did was OK, as long as you realize it won't be forever. You made some money, and are making some money, but since you don't have patent protection it's temporary; at some point, the free software replacements will be good enough. If you spout off at the mouth at those ungrateful wretches cloning your code, you'll only alienate people; if you attempt to slow down cloning efforts by trying to withhold licensing from whole organizations because they have one person who's helping out with arch, or monotone, or whatever, you'll just dry up sales faster.

You can still compete, for a while, based on better services and support, while keeping your app proprietary. But you need to recognize that at some point your existing revenue stream is going to go away. If, by then, you have other products and services in the pipeline, or new capabilities in BK others can't match, you'll make it, otherwise you won't.

But your righteousness just makes you look bad. Making BK available to Linus wasn't charity, it was marketing, and brilliant marketing at that. The publicity you've received is more valuable than if you spent 100% of your revenue on advertising; it is the main reason why your paying customers know who you are. Because of this, the Linux kernel developers and users are not in your moral debt. Also, because of this, getting into bitter arguments with free software developers counteracts the logic of helping out Linus in the first place: you're trying to get good publicity for your product. The last thing I'd want to recommend to my boss is a supplier who appears to always be on the verge of suing his customers.

If I were in your position, I'd be quieter and less defensive. If people beat you up for not being DFSG-free, you can simply say that you respect their choice not to use your software; it's not worth arguing. Same if they beat up Linus for using your stuff; you don't need to fight that one. Write a FAQ and point people to it when they make the same point again and again.

Unable to buy a copy of BK

atai — 2004-09-27T05:12:36+00:00

can BK or even Clearcase handle 1500 users working on the same code base? I assume that's what you mean in your message.

Following up after a day in the shop

iabervon — 2004-09-27T04:55:06+00:00

I agree entirely with the need for BK to be proprietary. I have no doubt that it is ahead of everything else due to having a full-time team of really good people. OSS can get full-time paid developers, but it doesn't tend to happen until a project is as big as Linux or Apache. I'd guess that someday arch will reach the point of being important enough to enough major projects that it will get enough development effort to surpass BK, but I'd bet that you and your current team will retire before then. Ironically, I think that the existance of people prohibited from using BK forces projects to use arch instead, and that gives arch market share and attention, meaning that it improves more quickly. If anyone could use BK, I bet arch would progress about as quickly as Hurd, and nobody but Tom Lord and RMS would really care about it.

On the other hand, I doubt that a competitor could learn anything significant from using BK. Actually, that's not quite true. I doubt that a competitor could learn anything more from personally using BK than from reading Documentation/BK-usage and similar documents. I'm fairly certain that everything that is really clever about BK would require as much effort to identity as something that could be reverse-engineered from BK as it did to work it out in the first place. You are, after all, constantly having to tell people that there are hard problems in version control; these people are hardly going to identify the hard problems and the solutions to them simply be using a tool which hides from the user just how hard the problems are. Linus has, at this point, used BK probably more intensely than anyone who doesn't work for BM (and quite possibly anyone who does). Linus is good enough to write a C compiler just because it seems like a good idea. Linus clearly cares a lot about version control and having it work right. But Linus hasn't decided to write his own version control system. Chances are that, if he hasn't done it, nobody else will.

A number of years ago, I used Purify from Rational. It was pretty easy to tell what it was doing from what it produced (plus, there were whitepapers provided which explained a bit more). On the other hand, there was absolutely no danger of anyone reverse=engineering and reimplementing it from using it (Years later, valgrind came out, which has a similar effect but using a very different method). Rational was perfectly willing to let whoever wanted to buy and use Purify to work on whatever they wanted. For that matter, they even gave me tech support, despite me using a trial license at a point when my employer's license hadn't been renewed (they were fanatical about the quality of the software; I was just telling them that -fomit-frame-pointer should be mentioned as a reason you can't debug a program; they wanted to make it work for my case). As far as I can tell, Rational did well on Purify. So there's at least that example of a successful model: let anyone of no commercial significance use your software for free; let anyone whose budget is noticable buy a license for a lot of money; don't worry about the competition. Just focus on getting as many people as possible, whoever they are, to pay you and your developers.

With 20/20 hindsight, I bet Google would now be even more thrilled with BK developed at Google and released under the GPL than they are with Orkut. Too bad there wasn't any way at the time to know it would work out that way...

Unable to buy a copy of BK

bronson — 2004-09-27T03:42:36+00:00

1500 corporate Arch users? There just ain't no way, no matter how many wrapper scripts you write. Arch barely scales to 1/10 that many users right now. Watch the Arch mailing list and IRC and notice the number of merge issues that need to be resolved by hand. It seems a small issue, but with 1500 users, this sort of manual labor will bury you.

You'd best give them a year or two to get the speed up and simplify the merging. Otherwise, you're going to have 1500 people using Arch as nothing more than a poor-man's RCS.

If you do manage to use Arch's features with even 200 corporate developers, please write an article about it! That would certainly be a potent milestone.

An Interview with Tom Lord of Arch (O'ReillyNet)

dvdeug — 2004-09-27T03:41:09+00:00

Not every discussion is a flame. He asked for suggestions, he got suggestions. If he doesn't want to hear comments about his decisions in this matter, he's welcome to avoid discussion groups where it's being discussed.

Following up after a day in the shop

lm — 2004-09-27T02:21:58+00:00

First of all, I have to say that metal shavings are way more fun than arguing with you about our business model. I had a blast in the shop, my new (very old, from the 1950's) mill works great after I cleaned it up. I have new pictures up at http://bitmover.com/lm/mill/ and before you start blasting me that that isn't great, try and remember that what I've done is sort of the "hello world" of metal working. I know it sucks but it's damn cool anyway.

OK, moving on...

To Felix.Braun, thanks very much for the acknowledgement that the goal was to help Linux and that we have succeeded beyond our wildest dreams. When we started I was scared stiff that we would lose Linus to burnout and he is still here, kicking butt, he's great. We helped make that happen, he has no problem admitting that, we're very proud of that. Yeah, yeah, wouldn't it be great if we did it with the GPL...

To kevinbsmith, we _don't_ change the license that much. That's just FUD that the GPL fanatics spread. The last change was more than a year ago and the last change before that was more than a year before that. So we are averaging a change a year. Not exactly frequent.

And the bit about me not being part of the open source community warrants comment. That hurts. I've been a long term member of this community, I've done a ton of work for this community, the founders of redhat acknowledge my work, my copyright is in several GNU utilities, and I created benchmarking tools that Linus and others use to this day to make sure they are doing the right thing (it's worth noting that I have suppressed every port of LMbench to windows for more than 10 years simply because if the data is out there then they will fix it).

But the real bummer is that BK exists to help the FLOSS community. It's the way that I could help the most. I've walked away from so much money, you can't even imagine (4th guy at Google? You think I'd be talking to you if I had stayed?) because I wanted to help Linus. It's pretty depressing that you don't realize that the choices I've made have been to help you. If your definition of "help" is "GPLed" then you need to broaden your horizons. There are a lot of ways to help and some pretty famous people have pointed out that what we have done has helped more than most.

To hppnq, sure we have considered the GPL. Of course we have considered that. I used to think that if we GPLed BK you'd all be happy but I think some of you are so fanatic that we could GPL BK and you'd still be pissed at us. Sigh. Anyway, we are in negotiations with a company who is 100% committed to the GPL. We discussed with them the idea of GPLing BK and they looked at us and said "are you nuts? You'd go out of business in a week!" And they are correct. We spend more in a week on payroll than any company has ever made on an open source SCM system in a year. That's a 50x problem. We need to pay our people and because all of you are so sure that you could reimplement BK in a week with some shell scripts there is zero, repeat, zero, nada, no friggin way, that we could survive with a GPLed product.

I encourage you to keep on thinking about this, it's way cool to have you thinking about ways to make it work. Many of you don't believe this but my goal is to help you. It's a huge bummer for me that in order to do that we have to be a typical corporate company, I would have loved to have done this with an open source product. Perhaps this is a good time to remind you that once upon a time BK was open source with a license that said "you can't remove the openlogging part" and you guys promptly removed that part of the code. The reason BK isn't open source is because your friends cheated. Let's keep that in perspective, OK?

So, as an outcome of the above arguments

gallir — 2004-09-26T23:15:21+00:00

we are realising that RMS is right: you cannot never trust in non-free
software, even is if comes from "amicable" people. It always hides
surprises, none of them very ethical, of course.

Nobody can "poke" with BK because it's "theirs"? also every knowledge
needed to build it? have they developed their own graph algorithm? did
the invent computers again? did they never see cvs and similar tools? did
they never read any academic paper?

Please Larry, stop claiming you "own" everything in your code and
therefore you every right on it. First because it's not true (and it's
not true for any computer program), second because nobody can check it
out.

You "poked" the whole world, and you now want to negate the same rights
to others because you want expensive cars. Nice, arrogant guy.

PS: even considering you software as a "physical product in a capitalist
free market", what you do (no selling it to a possible competitor) is
ethical and morally questionnable, possibly illegal in some countries.

An Interview with Tom Lord of Arch (O'ReillyNet)

hppnq — 2004-09-26T20:30:32+00:00

Why rub his nose in it? You don't like the license, just don't use BitKeeper. Even if I do agree with you on the technical points (I'd rather see BitKeeper get GPLed), it's not up to us, and coming down on Larry won't help the discussion. ;-)

Not everything is black and white -- and it's certainly not "us against them" here --, and though I think Bitmover's behaviour is likely to scare away customers (because of the apparent potential customer screening and reverse engineering obscurity), it is still their decision, up to some legal point.

Really, let's not start flaming each other to smithereens here.

Unable to buy a copy of BK

dvdeug — 2004-09-26T19:25:38+00:00

I can see that more general definition. However, "poking at" doesn't imply a process to me; keeping your eyes open during the normal course of using the program is not reverse engineering. Even playing around with a program to see how it works and how you could improve your program isn't really reverse engineering to me.

I seriously doubt that most of these people who were refused licenses were going to reverse engineer the program, instead just looking at it and possibly poking at it.

An Interview with Tom Lord of Arch (O'ReillyNet)

dvdeug — 2004-09-26T19:14:43+00:00

GPLing it wasn't the question in my mind. The problem with your license in my mind is that it plays all these games with who can and can't use the software; there seems to be hidden land mines for all those who don't want to be tied exclusively to BitKeeper forever. A "no reverse engineering" clause is at least user neutral.

And, as someone else said, don't expect us to ever love your non-open-source license, even if it's more reasonable. Your goals and needs aren't ours, and even if we understand why you're doing it, doesn't mean we have to like it. To those of us who consider ourselves part of a free software community, you're an outsider, and will always be so long as you use don't use a Free license.

Any content to this interview?

ibukanov — 2004-09-26T18:56:46+00:00

Well, the article did contain very valid points, but the altitude of Tom's answers hide that information pretty effectively.

One of the points he tried to make is that a version control system should be distributed and should support merge operations between branches easily. CVS does not have these properties and Subversion while addressing other CVS shortcomings does not resolve these points either while making the system administration more complex compared with CVS.