Linus on the BK withdrawal

Linus on the BK withdrawal

Posted Apr 7, 2005 15:54 UTC (Thu) by GreyWizard (guest, #1026)
In reply to: Linus on the BK withdrawal by jarto
Parent article: Linus on the BK withdrawal

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.

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