McVoy

Posted Apr 6, 2005 22:00 UTC (Wed) by emk (subscriber, #1128)
In reply to: Linus on the BK withdrawal by smoogen
Parent article: Linus on the BK withdrawal

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.