Linus on the BK withdrawal
Linus on the BK withdrawal
Posted Apr 7, 2005 8:17 UTC (Thu) by gowen (guest, #23914)In reply to: Linus on the BK withdrawal by jarto
Parent article: Linus on the BK withdrawal
Why should he help anyone in creating a competing product or reverse-engineering his?No-one's suggesting he should help. But once he's made his opinion clear that he's not going to help, and that he'll be as obstructive as possible (no licenses sold to people working on SCM), he should stop pretending to be the good guy.
Posted Apr 7, 2005 9:41 UTC (Thu)
by gvy (guest, #11981)
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Quote/link, please. Or STFU :-/
Posted Apr 7, 2005 13:11 UTC (Thu)
by gowen (guest, #23914)
[Link]
Posted Apr 7, 2005 14:29 UTC (Thu)
by jarto (guest, #3268)
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You're suggesting that the only way someone can be a good guy is by letting themselves be a**fu*ked. Look at it from his point of view:
1. You spend a lot of resources to create an excellent piece of software. Should you let those people you've helped for free walk all over you and jeopardize the future of your company?
Posted Apr 7, 2005 15:54 UTC (Thu)
by GreyWizard (guest, #1026)
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Should you let those people you've helped for free walk all over you and jeopardize the future of your company? No, you should not. You should do exactly what Larry has done. He has every right to change his business strategy in response to perceived threats. However, he should not be claiming that his company is the most open source friendly that anyone is ever going to see. That claim is absurd. Furthermore, he should not suggest that the open source communty has failed and must strive to be more like the marine corps. This merely demonstrates that he doesn't understand the principles that this community stands for in the first place. Personally I'm quite pleased that McVoy will be withdrawing the free client. As long as BitKeeper was free enough for Torvalds there was little actual need for a free software replacement. Once the kernel development team adopts Monotone or whatever they eventually choose that project will get an enormous amount of feedback and attention from smart people. I'm sure that after a few years of this the result will be as good or better than BitKeeper for free software development. Since McVoy will be now be focusing on proprietary software developers everybody wins.
Posted Apr 8, 2005 10:52 UTC (Fri)
by gowen (guest, #23914)
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> But once he's made his opinion clear that he's not going to helpJFYI: "gowno" is "shit" in Russian
Erm. OK. You want evidence that Larry won't help clone BK. He's only said it a million times, and written at least 3 license clauses precisely to that effect. How about this one :title removed because gvy is a silly child, who'd be better of at /.
"It's pretty clear what you want to do and you keep asking for us to help you and the answer now, and forever, is no, we aren't going to help you create a copy of our product."
As to "gowno" -- grow the hell up. It's not even the same letters as my log in.
-- Larry McVoy on lkml, 11 Feb '05
No-one's suggesting he should help. But once he's made his opinion clear that he's not going to help, and that he'll be as obstructive as possible (no licenses sold to people working on SCM), he should stop pretending to be the good guy.
Linus on the BK withdrawal
2. You let Open Source people use it for free to create Open Source software. Especially the Linux kernel.
3. Some people in the OS community want to reverse engineer it and create a competing free version.
4. You try to solve the problem with the license.
5. You notice that someone working for OSDL is doing reverse engineering.
6. You ask OSDL to stop it.
7. OSDL doesn't want to or can't stop the person.
Linus on the BK withdrawal
Yes, exactly what GreyWizard said
Linus on the BK withdrawal