Linus on the BK withdrawal

Posted Apr 6, 2005 19:57 UTC (Wed) by smoogen (subscriber, #97)
Parent article: Linus on the BK withdrawal

The issues are:

1) SCM is hard. Too few people can get a handle on the many person problem and get it even 1/3 way right.
2) Zealots like to stir up hornets nests no matter what.
3) If Larry McVoy decided to GPL the whole thing, there would be a large crowd saying that he needed to MPL it, BSD it, etc so they could use it in their XYZ project.

I think the best advertising Larry has gotten for his product is all the zealots who hate it. As a boss of mine said "I love linux except all zealots that go with it."

McVoy

Posted Apr 6, 2005 22:00 UTC (Wed) by emk (subscriber, #1128) [Link]

Well, to put it charitably, McVoy brought some of his problems on himself, just as Stallman does. McVoy appears to be both a bit combative and slightly thin-skinned, which is a fatal combination in the open source world. Linus, on the other hand, may be downright rude, but he doesn't get upset easily.

McVoy has also gone through a lot of license revisions, each time adding more restrictions. (This is what apparently got Alan Cox upset at various times in the past.) I don't find this behavior endearing from any company, whether the software is free or commercial--evaluating licenses takes time (and sometimes lawyers), and you can't trust anybody who makes major license changes with little warning.

Personally, I'm glad that the kernel is moving away from BitKeeper. McVoy was frequently upset about something, and a lot of kernel hackers resented having to use his software to access the kernel repositories. It's better for everybody this way.