Linus Torvalds' BitKeeper blunder [LWN.net]

Linus Torvalds' BitKeeper blunder

Posted May 5, 2005 15:31 UTC (Thu) by rickmoen (subscriber, #6943)
Parent article: Linus Torvalds' BitKeeper blunder

Bradley Chapman wrote:

the 'free beer' version of BitKeeper has been removed due to the so-called reverse engineering done by Andrew Tridgell

This claim reflects a rather eccentric and polemical theory of causation, rather like saying "It's your own fault I broke your wife's arm. You should have handed over your wallet."

I doubt that, e.g., Perforce would ever cease letting open-source developers have free-of-charge licences for their SCM (which they do, by the way), for no better reason than someone telnetting into a repository, hitting return, and following the resulting suggestion of typing "help" -- which is literally what Tridgell did. Yet, BitMover decides differently, and you call it "due to" Tridgell's small typing spree? Weird.

McVoy finding unbearable people manually issuing BitKeeper directives using telnet and netcat, and getting to see SCCS files by doing so, may or may not have been a rational response -- you be the judge -- but calling it all Tridgell's doing seems a bit warped.

Rick Moen
rick@linuxmafia.com

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Linus Torvalds' BitKeeper blunder

Posted May 6, 2005 0:34 UTC (Fri) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

Gosh. Of course not. Think about it: limit for 64K changesets was in BK from the day one. Why it was there ? 16bit word is not native size for contemporary processors. I'm pretty sure Larry planned for this from the very beginning. Not as for the outcome perhaps but for quite real possibility.

And in the end he even tried to blame open source community for not forcing everyone to play by his (constantly changing) rules: "This is really an open source community problem and I have to say that the open source community couldn't have failed more than they have. Unlike the Marine corp, the open source community is more than willing to ignore their bad apples as 'not my problem' (the Marine corp punishes the group for the behavior of the bad apples, pretty soon there are no bad apples)."

Gosh.