Jujutsu: a new, Git-compatible version control system

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