Jujutsu: a new, Git-compatible version control system [LWN.net]

Jujutsu: a new, Git-compatible version control system

Posted Jan 23, 2024 16:57 UTC (Tue) by paulj (subscriber, #341)
In reply to: Jujutsu: a new, Git-compatible version control system by Wol
Parent article: Jujutsu: a new, Git-compatible version control system

I don't think they were arguing to abolish Free Software or barn-raising.

I think they were arguing against large companies releasing free (as in beer) software as loss-leaders, to destroy value in markets and hurt any competition, and try gain (or hold) some monopoly position for themselves. Typically, where a company can succeed in this - i.e. the company with the deepest pockets, and the most ability to subsidise the loss-leader from revenue from other markets - it will later use that to gouge consumers in some way, be it by prices on the product directly or using control over the free product to force consumers into other paid products. Once monopoly has been created, investment tends to decrease, people working on it tend to become complacent - quality of the product also tends to suffer and/or innovation declines.

As an example, remember Microsoft and Netscape? MS bought a browser, bundled it for free into Windows - all paid for by their Windows and Office licensing revenue - and thus destroyed Netscape's ability to earn revenue.

MS eventually faced anti-trust actions, and lost.

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Jujutsu: a new, Git-compatible version control system

Posted Jan 23, 2024 18:05 UTC (Tue) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link] (4 responses)

> MS eventually faced anti-trust actions, and lost.

... did they really lose?

After all, the legal penalties they were eventually saddled with were even less than a slap on the wrist compared to the direct and indirect profits they made.

Jujutsu: a new, Git-compatible version control system

Posted Jan 23, 2024 18:41 UTC (Tue) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

They were important to make Chrome viable, although I'm not sure whether this should be considered success or not.

Jujutsu: a new, Git-compatible version control system

Posted Jan 24, 2024 10:33 UTC (Wed) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link] (2 responses)

They lost the ruling, so they lost for sure. They had to unbundle IE too and give other browser equal opportunity to be the default browser.

If not for that, Internet history could be quite different.

Jujutsu: a new, Git-compatible version control system

Posted Jan 24, 2024 14:30 UTC (Wed) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link] (1 responses)

> They lost the ruling, so they lost for sure.

They lost _on paper_ but by that point they long since accomplished what they set out to do, and are _still_ reaping the benefits. The fines they faced were a pittance, and the "default browser ballot" BS was per formative nonsense, because by that point IE was intimately tied into the entire MS business software ecosystem and _completely_ owned the corporate desktop + backend.

(What eventually broke that wasn't the browser ballot, but the rise of the modern smartphone)

> They had to unbundle IE too and give other browser equal opportunity to be the default browser.

Um, IE _never_ ceased to be bundled with MS Windows. It is a core component of Windows. [1] At best, the only thing "removed" was the icon that launched the "browser wrapper" around that built-in component. (Sure, it's now called "Edge" and is built on the Chrome engine instead of Triton, but it's still just as proprietary and intrinsicly bundled as ever!)

[1] An embedded browser engine is a core component of every OS, commercial or otherwise. released since Windows 98, and it's _not_ replacable.

Jujutsu: a new, Git-compatible version control system

Posted Jan 24, 2024 15:02 UTC (Wed) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link]

Oops, I managed to put my reply to you in another subthread. See: https://lwn.net/Articles/959326/

Jujutsu: a new, Git-compatible version control system

Posted Jan 23, 2024 22:47 UTC (Tue) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (4 responses)

> I don't think they were arguing to abolish Free Software or barn-raising.

The problem is "where do you draw the line?" I know I was being hyperbolic, intentionally, but seriously, do we want to ban giving things away?

And if giving stuff away is anti-competitive, then we should make anti-competitive behaviour illegal, not make giving stuff away illegal.

In this particular case, there are (or rather were) a couple of big contenders. There's Pick Systems (aka Raining Data, aka Tiger Logic, aka maybe a few other names too). Then there's INFORMATION, UniVerse, and Unidata, who merged into Ardent, aka Informix, aka IBM.

Then there were the minnows, jBase, QM, Reality, and Cache/MV. Ladybridge, aka a guy called Martin Phillips, was persuaded to release QM as the GPL OpenQM. (Incidentally, I didn't know that the "Open" has nothing to do with Open Source and everything to do with Open Systems aka commercial Unix! An earlier product, PI/Open, used the term Open in the same way, hence the inspiration for "QM on Linux" to be called OpenQM.)

Unfortunately, a company called Rocket has bought out pretty much all the commercial players, and the only real competitors left are Scarlet, Reality, and another minnow called OpenInsight. For example, I think the price of OpenQM has quadrupled since it was absorbed into Rocket a few years ago. UniData / UniVerse were always on the expensive side, but Rocket has raised the price of everything else to the same level.

I think that's why some of us want Scarlet as a viable competitor, but there's no way I want to leave potential Scarlet users up a gum tree if anything goes wrong, and given my experience trying to get Scarlet into my employer, I actually see the existence of a commercial version as a plus. I hope they come to see the existence of the Open Source version as a plus, too.

Cheers,
Wol

Jujutsu: a new, Git-compatible version control system

Posted Jan 24, 2024 10:38 UTC (Wed) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link] (3 responses)

Well yes, it is the anti-competitive behaviour that is unlawful.

Anti-competitive behaviour can be 1 large monopoly player abusing that position. It can also be all the corporate players in a market behaving in a certain way, which then undermines the competitiveness and interests of the programmers supplying the labour - which was spacefrogg's point.

Jujutsu: a new, Git-compatible version control system

Posted Jan 24, 2024 12:54 UTC (Wed) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (2 responses)

> It can also be all the corporate players in a market behaving in a certain way, which then undermines the competitiveness and interests of the programmers supplying the labour

But that's called a Cartel, which is just as illegal as anti-competitive dumping. You don't make giving things away illegal. If giving things away is part of wider misbehaviour, you tackle the misbehaviour, not the giving away.

And while I'm not going to say the company I'm talking about was a one-man-band (I really don't know), it was pretty much a one-pony show, even if there was a supporting cast.

Cheers,
Wol

Jujutsu: a new, Git-compatible version control system

Posted Jan 24, 2024 13:40 UTC (Wed) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link] (1 responses)

Who is arguing for banning giving things away? You've invented an argument that spacefrogg hasn't made!

AFAICT, spacefrogg was arguing against anti-competitive behaviours by corporates, including where the labour market is the victim of the anti-competitive behaviour. You are obviously aware of competition law. Not sure why you're arguing against positions no one here seems to have taken.

Jujutsu: a new, Git-compatible version control system

Posted Jan 24, 2024 15:36 UTC (Wed) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

> Who is arguing for banning giving things away? You've invented an argument that spacefrogg hasn't made!

To quote spacefrog himself ...

> Companies are not people! Companies cannot be gracious or nice or happy or caring. Like, you really think that? Companies should not allowed to give anything substantial away for free

If that's not spacefrog arguing for banning giving things away, I don't understand English !!!

Okay, and I admitted it, I've gone a bit over the top and taken his argument to an extreme. But it was his argument first. And as soon as you start getting into "where do you draw the line" you're going to end up in a war between the anarchists and the dictators. I'm firmly on the side of "(VOLUNTARILY!) giving things away is a good thing". If it's done with malicious intent, then you target the malice, not the gift.

Cheers,
Wol

Jujutsu: a new, Git-compatible version control system

Posted Jan 24, 2024 7:10 UTC (Wed) by rqosa (subscriber, #24136) [Link] (6 responses)

> MS bought a browser, bundled it for free into Windows

Bundling an application into an OS is not exactly the same thing as giving that application away for free, especially at a time when…

> MS eventually faced anti-trust actions, and lost.

…the OS in question held a de-facto monopoly position in the market for desktop-PC operating systems. (MS having that de-facto monopoly was the main reason why they were hit with an antitrust lawsuit, after all.)

Jujutsu: a new, Git-compatible version control system

Posted Jan 24, 2024 13:44 UTC (Wed) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link] (5 responses)

The issue that led to the antitrust case in the USA was the web browser, and MS leveraging their Windows monopoly to bundle IE for free into Windows, destroying the market for Netscape and making it technically difficult for other browsers such as Netscape to fully work as default browser on Windows.

Are other cases, inc. ones that spacefrogg may be worried out, different in their details? Sure. Still potential anti-competitive behaviour if some large corporate uses free products undermine the market for other actors (inc. those supplying labour).

Jujutsu: a new, Git-compatible version control system

Posted Jan 24, 2024 15:01 UTC (Wed) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link] (3 responses)

My memory is MS actually had to provide a version of OEM Windows with IE unbundled/removed to vendors who wanted it. The library might still have been there, but there wasn't an IE app.

One of the reasons for the suit being that Netscape had had deals with PC makers to ship PCs with Netscape installed, which then became awkward / suboptimal when MS bundled IE and made it hard to set other browsers as default (fully). The ruling provided some relief on that. I don't know if many vendors went for that unbundled OEM version though - 1 did I thought, but that's my vague recollection. Part of how they got away with so little punishment was the Clinton admin got replaced by Bush.

Did it address all the issues, did it right all wrongs MS did with anti-competitive behaviours? No. But it did damage their reputation, it did put some kind of check on them, and it was the catalyst for further competition law investigations and restrictions put on them. E.g., the EU required them to open up protocol specs, and stop stymying projects such as Samba. They also got a massive fine and had to unbundle WMP cause of EU actions.

Things would certainly be much much worse now if MS had been left completely unchecked.

Jujutsu: a new, Git-compatible version control system

Posted Jan 25, 2024 1:58 UTC (Thu) by rqosa (subscriber, #24136) [Link] (2 responses)

> Things would certainly be much much worse now if MS had been left completely unchecked.

Case in point: this

> Every new PC sold with Windows 8 will be locked up tight with Microsoft's UEFI ... secure boot on

Not that I don't agree that there's a potentially dangerous precedent here, but this is omitting a key detail. For x86 computers, MS's certification requires that users can disable secure boot. (emphasis mine) Of course, this is not true for ARM computers, hence the dangerous precedent.

I don't remember the exact details, but for some reason I'd been under the impression that the final settlement with the DOJ in that 2001 antitrust lawsuit in the U.S. had the effect of imposing that requirement that PC owners must be allowed to disable Secure Boot. (Or if not specifically that one, then maybe the 2004-2007 antitrust action in Europe is the one that forced MS to not prohibit end-users from disabling Secure Boot instead?)

(see also this Q/A on superuser.com for some more technical details that might be relevant here)

Jujutsu: a new, Git-compatible version control system

Posted Jan 25, 2024 13:34 UTC (Thu) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link] (1 responses)

The UEFI disableable-secure-boot thing was driven by the fact that Windows 7 had major issues with UEFI booting, and large PC makers (and their customers) wanted to keep using Windows 7 on new hardware at least until the initial teething problems with Win8 were handled.

As it turned out, Win8 was so bad that most folks downgraded it to Win 7 (via an officially-sanctioned-by-Microsoft mechanism), and the status quo didn't really change until Win 10.

This had nothing to do with any antitrust action, and everything to do with actual market forces.

Jujutsu: a new, Git-compatible version control system

Posted Jan 25, 2024 14:12 UTC (Thu) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

> This had nothing to do with any antitrust action, and everything to do with actual market forces.

Mess-up or not, I'm pretty certain it was rather more than market forces. The EU is keeping a close eye on Microsoft, and I'm pretty certain it got pushed through as "If MS is allowed to do that, then it's a pretty safe bet that consumer hardware will ONLY be able to run Windows". Hence the requirement that buyers MUST be able to disable Secure Boot, if they so wish.

Cheers,
Wol

Jujutsu: a new, Git-compatible version control system

Posted Jan 25, 2024 0:17 UTC (Thu) by rqosa (subscriber, #24136) [Link]

> The issue that led to the antitrust case in the USA was the web browser, […]

The real reason I posted that comment was to dispute spacefrogg's statement that "it is bad for society if companies are allowed to give stuff away for free, because this creates a situation where people easily get dependent on the free stuff", on the basis that a monopolistic company (e.g. Microsoft circa 2001) should not be considered equal to a smaller & less-powerful company (e.g. Netscape circa 2001), let alone to a non-wealthy individual person (e.g. some random hobbyist programmer who has some Git repos hosted on Codeberg today).

Antitrust law (both in the US and in the EU) certainly doesn't treat monopolists the same as non-monopolists, by design. And for good reason, IMO.

> […] and MS leveraging their Windows monopoly to bundle IE for free into Windows

Exactly my point: MS's Windows monopoly was a necessary condition which needed to be met in order for the government to sue MS (for violating antitrust law).