What exactly was risked by the telnet and netcat trick?

What exactly was risked by the telnet and netcat trick?

dlang, thanks for clarifying that. It's one of the aspects of the former situation that had been left hanging for a long time. (Just for completeness, I note in passing a potentially importance difference in kind between direct open-source access to a repository's contents and access through a gateway that exists courtesy of a third party's goodwill and willingness to fund it.)

Many long ago clearly wearied of this entire subject, but I remain interested in seeing whether some key factual questions can resolved with a reasonable degree of objectivity. For example: What was BitMover's real concern with Tridgell's activity? The legal basis for their complaint was at best thin (attempting to control what a licensee's contractor did in his spare time), but that's not the point: What actual proprietary interest was threatened?

(I pose that as a real, not rhetorical, question. One might well have existed and been at risk, but what specifically was it?)

You say the metadata in question was the repository's internal data structures (how I'm interpreting your phrase "the stuff that bitkeeper uses to track the patches", anyway -- correct me if I'm wrong). And it would seem reasonable to assert that those BK repository data structures were and remain a trade secret -- like BK's advanced merge algorithm, etc. But, unless I'm missing something vital, Tridgell's activity would seem to have given him no discernable access to repository data structures, SCM merge algorithms, etc. Those remained squirreled away in, variously, the BitMover-hosted repositories and the proprietary, binary-only client software. What Tridgell's perfunctory telnet-and-netcat "client" fetches is... SCCS files.

Given that distinction, if "BitMover-proprietary metadata" denotes, as you say, something much more sensitive than a pile of SCCS files -- which sensitive information would logically exist in the hosted repository and proprietary client but not the SCCS files -- then what company-proprietary information was McVoy upset over?

I have no objection to how you construe the term "metadata" in this context -- but then that's not what Tridgell retrieved, is it?

Rick Moen
rick@linuxmafia.com