LWN: Comments on "CodePlex.com donates $25,000 to Mercurial project"

CodePlex.com donates $25,000 to Mercurial project

bronson — Mon, 13 Sep 2010 04:54:47 +0000

V2 is pretty simple when compared to V3.

Patent language in a copyright license

man_ls — Sun, 12 Sep 2010 22:05:42 +0000

A *copyright* licence should not (need to) contain *patent* language

Agreed. But as long as the only way to distribute software is to work around software patents, such language is indeed required. The Apache License 2.0 contains it too. Are you against the ASLv2 too?

By the way, ASLv2 is almost 4 times as long as ASLv1.1 (and it was also new and untried when it came out). I guess you opposed the switch to ASLv2 too when it came out? (Don't really care about it, but just wanted to point out the straw man.)

CodePlex.com donates $25,000 to Mercurial project

dark — Sun, 12 Sep 2010 16:52:37 +0000

GPLv2 is not "pretty simple". I speak as someone who has often had to explain the "unless that component itself accompanies the executable" exception to the exception in section 3 :)

Since free software licenses have to be understood by free software programmers they should be simple, and I'd say the GPLv2 is on the far edge of acceptable complexity.

I don't yet know whether the GPLv3 is even more complex, but it is twice as long and that does not bode well.

CodePlex.com donates $25,000 to Mercurial project

intgr — Fri, 10 Sep 2010 20:46:59 +0000

Here's another explanation: if Matt Mackall starts working on Mercurial full time then he won't be contributing to the Linux kernel anymore. ;)

No, I don't think this was actually Microsoft's motive; Matt himself asked for money for this purpose.

CodePlex.com donates $25,000 to Mercurial project

intgr — Fri, 10 Sep 2010 20:38:15 +0000

> A *copyright* licence should not (need to) contain *patent* language :-(
GPLv2 includes patent language too, see sections 6 and 7 and it's a very good thing.
Enjoy your GPLv1 ;)

CodePlex.com donates $25,000 to Mercurial project

anselm — Fri, 10 Sep 2010 16:22:53 +0000

Especially since the git and Mercurial communities don't seem to be actively fighting about contributors. If anything, the tangle of stuff that is git these days seems to suggest that there is an overabundance of contributors to the project and not enough direction. Mercurial, on the other hand, may not have all the bells and whistles of git but it is arguably a much more straightforward piece of software to deal with for many people.

Anyway, git may be the DVCS of choice for the Linux kernel, but enough free software projects opt for Mercurial for it to not make a big difference to the world whether Microsoft backs Mercurial or git, or none of them or both.

CodePlex.com donates $25,000 to Mercurial project

Trelane — Fri, 10 Sep 2010 14:57:04 +0000

A-HA! So you don't deny there *were* hidden agreements from the other vendors! I *knew* this "Mozilla Foundation" was up to no good!

CodePlex.com donates $25,000 to Mercurial project

spaetz — Fri, 10 Sep 2010 14:41:21 +0000

Nice conspiracy theory talent :).

I wonder why people cannot simply accept that an entity can give a bit of money to a project which is useful to them without planning to kill the world. Someone said it already, 25k$ is less than a newspaper advertisment :).

(and yes, I got your point that you did not actually imply any hidden second motive)

CodePlex.com donates $25,000 to Mercurial project

nix — Fri, 10 Sep 2010 07:54:45 +0000

As long as you take external coercion out of the picture and the profits are gained for voluntary exchange then profits are a result of providing value and goods to your customer better and more efficiently then otherwise is possible if somebody else did it. That is your increasing your wealth by increasing the wealth of society at whole so that it's a net gain for everybody.
In that case then pursuing profits in themselves are a virtue.

I'm afraid that Adam Smith disagrees with you. There are many, many situations which can apply which can prevent this rosy picture from coming true, and normally many of them apply at once. You need a lot more than just 'no external coercion'. One trivial additional condition, for instance: monopolies and quasi-monopolies. Note that due to network effects computing is ridiculously monopoly-prone. I doubt the conditions you suggest have applied to the computing market for even one single day in its entire history.

CodePlex.com donates $25,000 to Mercurial project

dag- — Thu, 09 Sep 2010 23:07:59 +0000

What, they are funding viral licensed software ?

Why aren't there any big headlines now ?

CodePlex.com donates $25,000 to Mercurial project

xtifr — Thu, 09 Sep 2010 18:38:09 +0000

A lot of people are looking for hidden motives here. I think it may be as simple as this: Mercurial is a major competitor of Git. Git is the dvcs used for Linux. Strengthening and improving Mercurial has the potential to undermine the acceptance and use of Git, which reduces the potential contributor pool for Git.

Note that I'm not saying that this is their motive (not even necessarily a secondary motive). I'm just saying that if you want to be paranoid, you don't actually have to look too far. :)

CodePlex.com donates $25,000 to Mercurial project

Trelane — Thu, 09 Sep 2010 15:20:39 +0000

Sorry, the "duh" was out of place, in knee-jerk reaction to your "*rollseyes*" which is also out of place. I rescind the "duh;" sorry.

CodePlex.com donates $25,000 to Mercurial project

Trelane — Thu, 09 Sep 2010 14:11:53 +0000

It'd be hidden if it were not apparent without further digging.

duh.

CodePlex.com donates $25,000 to Mercurial project

dgm — Thu, 09 Sep 2010 13:54:27 +0000

Same here. The only real problem is that git-svn is sloooooooow on Windows. Also gitk and git gui are very nice tools that work exactly the same on Linux and Windows.

CodePlex.com donates $25,000 to Mercurial project

pboddie — Thu, 09 Sep 2010 10:47:43 +0000

Meh. It puts them in the highest-tier position (http://mercurial.selenic.com/sponsors/) like GOOG and Fog Creek. The same arguments can be presented there.

It's nice to have companies donate money to worthy causes, but from my experience with seeing how hard it can be to attract conference sponsorship, I imagine that this level of contribution is the smallest a reasonably large company can give without the budgeting being a hassle.

For a conference, you'd think that setting sponsorship levels at $10000 and lower would attract lots of sponsors because such money is peanuts to a large corporation, and they get a reasonable amount of good, focused publicity, but it's rather likely that someone in such a corporation whose job it is to throw money around for promotional initiatives or "community encouragement" sees small donations as making more work for them: they'd rather throw down a larger amount and use up their budget more quickly doing less work. And I know of one large company who sponsored a conference and never got round to pay the invoice in the end: that says a lot about the corporate mindset, I think, and the organisers of that conference have shown considerable restraint in not naming and shaming the company in question.

So, it's nice to see a contribution that someone in Microsoft thought was worth their while making, but the observation about maximising goodwill is completely valid, too. They, Google and Fog Creek are all doing good business around Mercurial.

CodePlex.com donates $25,000 to Mercurial project

lmb — Thu, 09 Sep 2010 10:19:02 +0000

I find this quite fabulous: an Open Source project so popular that at least one of its key contributors (and project leader) gets to work full-time on it on donated money. Talk about success, baby. Congratulations, Matt.

So Microsoft is donating money to Open Source development, with no strings attached? Seems to be all in order, and an impressive win for Open Source: apparently, even MSFT has realized that there are areas where OSS is the right model. Infrastructure that is hard to monetize: that's how it started with Linux too.

(Troll: given the choice nowadays, I'd rather cheer for MS than for Apple, anyway.)

I have been personally extremely happy with hg. While both git and hg seem to be doing essentially the same thing, I find it easier to wrap my head around how hg is used. So I'm quite happy to see that picked up.

CodePlex.com donates $25,000 to Mercurial project

Fowl — Thu, 09 Sep 2010 07:42:28 +0000

They wouldn't be very hidden if they told you!

*rollseyes*

CodePlex.com donates $25,000 to Mercurial project

shmget — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 23:44:19 +0000

>As long as you take external coercion out of the picture and the profits are gained for voluntary exchange then profits are a result of providing value and goods to your customer better and more efficiently then otherwise is possible if somebody else did it. That is your increasing your wealth by increasing the wealth of society at whole so that it's a net gain for everybody.

There is an hidden assumptions: that such transaction are between two and only two parties . that these parties are fully informed, and are free (you did mentioned that one, I just re-assert it for completeness).

In real life such transactions are rare.

As soon as Ads are in play for instance, you have at least 3 parties in each transaction. the 'service' provider, the end-user and the Advertiser (in practice there is a Ad broker, an ad agency and a company that pay for the add, all of which are different goals, none of these goals being the interest of the end-user).

For exmaple:
- Microsoft pay Verizon to force Bing upon Verizon's customers.
- Apple block ip-phone Apps
- NBC acquire a monopoly on the Olympic and MS pay them to force SilverLight on the masses.
- The poster child of such dysfunctional scheme being the US health care system: Employees Are customers of Doctors. Doctors are paid by Insurance, Insurance cater to employer, and employer employ employee. Result the employee is twice remove from the insurance, and the later rightfully consider the employee as a burden, not a customer.

>I'll just buy a pencil from a different company or use a pen. Anybody wanting to sell pencils to people need to make sure that they do it in a way that benefits their customers and pleases them. :)

But in real-life the party that buy the pencil and the party that use it are two distinct entities and most of the time have competing goals.
and that is exactly how 'you can remain in business by doing a worse job than your competitor'. Because 'worse' here is being assess from the point of view of the pencil user, not the 'pencil procurement officer' point of view.

CodePlex.com donates $25,000 to Mercurial project

Wol — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 23:27:27 +0000

Simply put ...

GPL2 is a pretty simple licence

GPL3 is new, untried, and contains an awful lot of language that shouldn't be there! (That's not a criticism of the people who wrote v3 - it's a criticism of the lunatics who made a rewrite "necessary". A *copyright* licence should not (need to) contain *patent* language :-(

Cheers,
Wol

CodePlex.com donates $25,000 to Mercurial project

dlang — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 22:39:21 +0000

see the many public comments by Linus for one example.

I fully recognize that many people believe that GPLv3 is better, and for their code I believe that they have the right to choose what license they use.

CodePlex.com donates $25,000 to Mercurial project

Trelane — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 22:24:52 +0000

I am assuming that you're one of "a lot of people."

In what ways is the license better, and what purposes are those?

CodePlex.com donates $25,000 to Mercurial project

Trelane — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 22:24:10 +0000

[citation needed]

CodePlex.com donates $25,000 to Mercurial project

dlang — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 22:17:28 +0000

because a lot of people believe that GPLv2 is a better license for their purposes than GPLv3

CodePlex.com donates $25,000 to Mercurial project

ballombe — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 21:57:14 +0000

Getting funding from Microsoft (Microsoft is actively giving money to project so that they do not move to GPL3).

CodePlex.com donates $25,000 to Mercurial project

Trelane — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 21:45:12 +0000

Great! Did the others have hidden agreements?

CodePlex.com donates $25,000 to Mercurial project

mpmselenic — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 21:41:25 +0000

Just like any Mercurial sponsor, Microsoft gets their logo on the sponsors page and a warm fuzzy feeling. Oh, and I also did a brief interview for their blog post.

CodePlex.com donates $25,000 to Mercurial project

Cyberax — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 19:34:52 +0000

It works OK in git. Though we did have some problems when it was not turned on at the beginning.

CodePlex.com donates $25,000 to Mercurial project

error27 — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 19:31:55 +0000

One of the advantages of hg is that it can mangle windows and unix line endings so that linux and windows people can work together easily. Does this work for you in git or is it not an issue for your project?

CodePlex.com donates $25,000 to Mercurial project

Trelane — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 18:42:38 +0000

What's the purpose of staying GPLv2-only compatible?

CodePlex.com donates $25,000 to Mercurial project

dlang — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 17:56:05 +0000

I hope that they have the courage to remain GPLv2 compatible.

CodePlex.com donates $25,000 to Mercurial project

Trelane — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 17:42:52 +0000

Any comment on what the terms of the donation were, if any?

CodePlex.com donates $25,000 to Mercurial project

Trelane — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 17:41:24 +0000

Meh. It puts them in the highest-tier position (http://mercurial.selenic.com/sponsors/) like GOOG and Fog Creek. The same arguments can be presented there.

Perhaps the biggest / only difference is the lack of (widely-circulated?) press release. I'm not seeing a press release from GOOG; perhaps I'm just missing it.

CodePlex.com donates $25,000 to Mercurial project

chad.netzer — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 17:35:23 +0000

http://mercurial.selenic.com/wiki/License#Will_you_relice...

They just re-licensed from GPLv2-only to GPLv2+ this past year, requiring consent from contributors (even I was contacted, and I no longer have a clue what trivial thing I contributed.) :) But anyway, they are now GPLv3 compatible.

CodePlex.com donates $25,000 to Mercurial project

caitlinbestler — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 17:23:33 +0000

Probably because $250,000 is what a *real* contribution would have been.

Face it, at this amount this is nothing but a cheap ad.

VSS is only for peasants

Doogie — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 17:09:01 +0000

VSS is unsuitable for any purpose, AFAIAC.

CodePlex.com donates $25,000 to Mercurial project

stephenrwalli — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 16:50:47 +0000

Yes -- I can confirm as the CodePlex Foundation technical director that it wasn't us giving money to Mercurial. We're a non-profit. We are a separate organization. This was definitely the Microsoft forge site, codeplex.com, donating to the project. And yes, it's a good thing.

CodePlex.com donates $25,000 to Mercurial project

phunter_codeplex — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 16:46:42 +0000

Just to clarify, Microsoft's CodePlex Forge (www.codeplex.com - Open Source Project Hosting) donated the $25,000, not the CodePlex Foundation (www.codeplex.org). We want to make sure credit is given to the right group.

CodePlex.com donates $25,000 to Mercurial project

drag — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 15:08:47 +0000

Ah, my mistake. I read 250,000 for some reason. Thanks for the correction.

CodePlex.com donates $25,000 to Mercurial project

drag — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 14:55:31 +0000

> A company pursuing profits isn't a bad thing - as long as it's not the *only* thing.

As long as you take external coercion out of the picture and the profits are gained for voluntary exchange then profits are a result of providing value and goods to your customer better and more efficiently then otherwise is possible if somebody else did it. That is your increasing your wealth by increasing the wealth of society at whole so that it's a net gain for everybody.

In that case then pursuing profits in themselves are a virtue.

Remember: Just as long as it's voluntary. As long as people are free to choose you or your competitors then they will choose to spend the money on what business maximizes their own interest. That is spending money on your business increases their own wealth as a result.

> I'm just saying that it shouldn't be their *primary* aim, like most companies regard it. Surely your primary aim is to actually do your business and do it effectively and well?

How can you remain in business by doing a worse job then your competitors?

> Customer service probably comes below that and above profit too. Otherwise you get no end of compromises made in the name of profit-increase (no new pencil for you until you provide the worn-down stub of your previous pencil!).

I don't really understand your example.

If I have to spend time fumbling around with a stub of a pencil or spend my time looking for a lost good pencil instead of doing my job then profits of my employer will suffer because they will be spending money on me doing something other then what makes them money. Therefore in attempt to pursue profits it's important for them to make sure that I have the proper tools to get my job done in a efficient manner.

If I am a customer of a pencil maker and they have a attitude were I need to provide them remnants of my old pencil before they will sell me a new one at exorbitant prices then I'll just buy a pencil from a different company or use a pen. Anybody wanting to sell pencils to people need to make sure that they do it in a way that benefits their customers and pleases them. :)

CodePlex.com donates $25,000 to Mercurial project

Alterego — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 14:49:59 +0000

25.000 is not a quarter million.
It is a really small contribution, and you are off by one order of magnitude...