Bitkeeper

I think it would be appropriate at this point to write a free client that talks with Bitkeeper, and for Linux developers to start switching to that from Bitkeeper. At that point, McVoy will face a hard choice:
if he carries out these threats, he risks alienating the community that he hopes will market Bitkeeper for him.

Maybe. I'll leave that decision to whomever decides to invest his time and/or money in implementing such software.

That would be a bit premature. I certainly wouldn't switch to a piece of software that doesn't exist yet. ;)

To put it more bluntly: free software would have to implement a very significant amount of Bitkeeper's functionality before I would ever consider switching to it.

At the moment there simply is no equivalent free alternative to Bitkeeper, so there's nothing to switch to. Once such an alternative exists we could continue this debate.

kind regards,

Rik

Great minds drink alike.

How about all of you take a much nicer tilt on this, and ask McVoy (who's already giveing you the software free) his price to GPL bitkeeper.
Nick

Wow, I've just totally underestimated the $$ power on this list. ;)

Make Larry a clear business case and I'm sure he will. However even though I don't agree with Larry on a lot of things I do agree that there isn't a sane case for him to GPL that software.

Larry actually had exactly these and related discussions before he ever went to Linus and others with the arrangement he proposed about free if your logs are public.

If you want to make something replace bitkeeper make it better. When Larry has customers forcing him to write bk to [whatever] convertors you've won.

Hi!

Well, we already made him write bk to CVS convertor ;-))))))))).

Pavel

When do you have a heart between your knees?
[Johanka's followup: and *two* hearts?]

THIS IS NOT A BITKEEPER MAILING LIST.

Thanks,

Jeff

To add to this, why?

I don't mean to jump on anyone, but so long as someone can pull all the BK data out if Larry gets unreasonable (via the active and existing SVN or CVS gateways) who the frig cares if there's a BK clone??? If things got nasty, pull the data and switch unceremoniously switch to SVN or whatever.

Are there folks out there today with current SVN repos which have all the BK metadata everyone keeps pissing on about?

That's a good question indeed.

You're right. There is no data lock-in, so there is no reason at all why we (FSVO "we") would even need a free alternative to Bitkeeper.

People who really care about Bitkeeper being non-free can work towards making a free alternative. Some people are doing exactly that (I bet you won't see them in this thread though, they're too busy doing useful stuff).

On Fri, 2003-07-18 15:32:06 -0500, Shawn <[email protected]> wrote in message <1058560325.2662.31.camel@localhost>:

Have you ever used eg. cvsps with the BK->CVS gateway? I tried this and failed because of 4 issues:

- I couldn't get the initial import patchset (2)
- I couldn't get two other patchsets
- One patchset added a file which already existed (11504)

Trying cvsps with the BKCVS gateway, you won't be able to automagically import all these patchsets into some other SCM. I got the BKCVS->SVN script and I'm still looking at it. Other than that, I'm to have a deep look at cvsps if there's some hidden bug which lets it fail on mentioned four patchsets...

However, I want to thank Larry for the BC->CVS gateway. Eventually, some customers could make some use out of it, but it definitively tells us that Larry is willing to do more than giving BK away (in most cases for free (as in beer)) - he's investing in it as well as tryin' to keep us using it (for what he offers some small presents from time to time such as hosting service and BK->CVS).

MfG, JBG

   Jan-Benedict Glaw       [email protected]    . +49-172-7608481
   "Eine Freie Meinung in  einem Freien Kopf    | Gegen Zensur | Gegen Krieg
    fuer einen Freien Staat voll Freier Bürger" | im Internet! |   im Irak!
      ret = do_actions((curr | FREE_SPEECH) & ~(IRAQ_WAR_2 | DRM | TCPA));

Work with Ben Collins on that. I don't know what cvsps is so I can't help you there. If you can figure out what is wrong with the tree and explain what we should do to fix it, we'll give it a tree.

---
Larry McVoy              lm at bitmover.com          http://www.bitmover.com/lm

On Sat, 2003-07-19 11:49:44 -0700, Larry McVoy <[email protected]> wrote in message <[email protected]>:

Thanks fot hint'n'offer!

Basically, cvsps sucks off the rlog messages and compares any check-in texts / times of any files to find out what has been checked-in with a single check-in. That is then called a patchset (cvs_ps_). With some command line arguments, it'll then output the check-in text as well as a unified diff.

This information can then be used to feed it to other SCMs or for simple review tasks. While doing consistency checks, I discivered the mentioned inconsistency (at patchset 11504 IIRC) as well as some minor glitches (I had one patchset where the check-in comment changed after I re-fetched the patchset some days later...).

However, I'm working at spare time on it, so it'll take some time:(

MfG, JBG

   Jan-Benedict Glaw       [email protected]    . +49-172-7608481
   "Eine Freie Meinung in  einem Freien Kopf    | Gegen Zensur | Gegen Krieg
    fuer einen Freien Staat voll Freier Bürger" | im Internet! |   im Irak!
      ret = do_actions((curr | FREE_SPEECH) & ~(IRAQ_WAR_2 | DRM | TCPA));

Hmm. I would guess that makes rlog very happy. And sleepy :)

We're looking at getting some seperate bandwidth for bkbits.net and turning on the patch feature of BK/Web. Then you'll be able to do a

    wget http://linux.bkbits.net/linux-2.5/[email protected]

and get something like the following. I suspect this is better than cvsps and it will work for all repositories on bkbits.net, not just the mainline one. Is that good enough for what you want? The format below repeats for each file in the changeset.

===== man/man1/bk-config-etc.1 1.23.1.1 vs 1.26 ===== 02/05/16 13:44:09 [email protected] 1.24 +16 -0
Document 'trust_window' parameter
02/10/03 11:24:15 [email protected] 1.23.1.2 +9 -0
Docuement the BK_CONFIG environmental variable

@@ -30,6 +30,15 @@
 (/etc/BitKeeper/etc/config) then that setting will override any 
 matching key in local config files.  
 .LP
+Also configuration entries can be overridden with the
+.B BK_CONFIG
+environmental variable.  That variable can contain a list of key:value
+pairs seperated by semicolons.  For example:
+.DS
+.BR BK_CONFIG =\c
+.IR key1 : value2 ; key2 : value2 ; key3 : value3\c
+.DE
+.LP
 Minimum content requirements for the BitKeeper/etc/config file 
 
-- 

---
Larry McVoy lm at bitmover.com http://www.bitmover.com/lm

On Sat, 2003-07-19 12:05:31 -0700, Larry McVoy <[email protected]> wrote in message <[email protected]>:

Well, it's not exactly fast and it takes quite some CPU cycles on my side. However, that's a spare box (HP-PARISC B132L+, 132 MHz) which doesn't have to do anything else:)

That's quite good:) Are file renames also represented as patches (ie. one file gets removed, another one is added)?

To draw the line, that's exactly what one could wish. It someone isn't happy with the format, it seems to be easily Perl'ed/sed'ed/...

I've not yet looked at any other trees than the linux-2.5^H6 tree, but I'm currently spending some time to work on merging some trees to one (read: I want to merge all the non-i386 linux ports) and that involves quite some scripting / SCMing and up to now, I've not found the Super-SCM to achieve that:) Tasks are to get all ports to current 2.6.x, distribute their patches among them and pushing it (separated in small pieces) to Linus at some far future...

If I could get perfect patches like that out of bkbits.net (at least for the projects hosted there), that could potentially ease the task a lot:)

MfG, JBG
PS: http://lug-owl.de/~jbglaw/linux-ports/
PPS: I'm missing quite a lot of informations there - if you're a port maintainer, please get in contact with me:)

   Jan-Benedict Glaw       [email protected]    . +49-172-7608481
   "Eine Freie Meinung in  einem Freien Kopf    | Gegen Zensur | Gegen Krieg
    fuer einen Freien Staat voll Freier Bürger" | im Internet! |   im Irak!
      ret = do_actions((curr | FREE_SPEECH) & ~(IRAQ_WAR_2 | DRM | TCPA));

I can't believe I am going to do this. Especially, where most of my contributions to OSS/Free Software are not known on this list and the argument is stupid.

McVoy, changing the protocol would be extremely stupid. However, it is your product, so do as you wish.

Stallman, believe it or not, you used to be someone I looked up to a great deal. I still think some of your ideas are great and I would love to see the entire world as open source. However, to encourage people to do things that are known to antagonize others is crazy. CVS is crap. I haven't used Bitkeeper but I have tried a lot of others, and they are junk. So, if Bitkeeper is as good as Linus et al think it is, then it would be insane to do anything to ruin the relationship they have with Bitkeeper. Ideology is great, but it does have to be tempered and meted out so that it can be implemented in a way that brings the most good to everyone. At this point, ticking off McVoy will likely do the opposite.

McVoy, thank you for helping Linus, Cox, Miller et al scale better. As I have said before, I hope there is some way your software can become more open, but I will leave that up to you and your team to figure out when and how.

Have a good one everyone.

Trever
--
"All this technology has somehow made you a stranger in your own land." -- Robert M. Pirsig

I second that "Ata boy!". Larry, thank you, for all the help you gave Linus in the switch over, all the LK specific tweaks to BK, etc.

There are problems with the current protocol which can't be fixed without a protocol rev, problems that many of the kernel developers have asked us to fix. Sooner or later we are going to fix them and then there will be a protocol rev. It's possible we might do one for legal reasons but I doubt it. I was just pointing out to Rory that if he insisted on doing something in direct violation of our license it wouldn't do him any good in the long run.

My pleasure. At least that part of all of this has worked out pretty well. We still think BK is nowhere near good enough, there is a lot left to be done. I just spent the day with one of the MySQL founders talking about tools for doing reviews, I think those could help. It might be very cool, for example, if there was a way to distribute the review process and have everyone looking over code, recording notes about possible problems, etc. Then Dave could grab an espresso, hit the web site, look over the code he cares about, see the reviews, fix it, move on. It's sort of "attach the bug report directly to the code" rather than have a bug report. Don't know if it will work or not but we may try it. Stuff like that is potentially useful and part of the reason we think we're nowhere near done.

---
Larry McVoy              lm at bitmover.com          http://www.bitmover.com/lm

Ah, sorry. I was meaning the Microsoft kind of switching is stupid. You have tech reasons, great do them. Mr. McVoy, sorry about my blanket statement. You obviously weren't just acting the way I thought you were.

Now that is a fantastic idea, kind of like cvs meets bugzilla in one product. I hope you are able to do it.

Anyway, please, everyone either take it private with me, or leave me out of it. At this point everyone knows how I feel about the issue and why I do. All of these arguments only seem to reinforce those feelings and thoughts.

RMS thank you for the good you do. Linus and all, thank you VERY much for all the good you do. Larry, thank you for your kind response.

Good day to you all.

Trever
--
"In protocol design, perfection has been reached not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away." --
RFC1925: The Twelve Networking Truths

One nit.

I don't think Alan is using BK. I could be wrong though.

I'm not - and with the snapshots neither I or anyone else is forced to.

For the linux kernel. The problem is the satellite projects which adopt bitkeeper less carefully. Unless there is a general gateway I have missed.

Eric

They do not provide snapshots?

As long as tar files are distributed for each minor release, there is no true 'lock in'. If you need a gateway for a specific satellite project, there are people that could probably hook you up with the software required, and if there are other people in your situation, one of them probably has enough CPU + network + disk resources to host it.

The Bit Keeper issue is entirely a philosophical one. I understand that Linus chooses to use it, because it allows him to be more efficient. Alan Cox chooses not to use it (I'm not clear on his reasons, but I assume they are just as good). What more proof do we need that Bit Keeper is not locking people in?

I don't use it, and have never used it at this point, primarily because I happen to be in the source management field currently, and I have chosen to respect Larry's license. I'm certain that if I ever had a proper need in terms of kernel development, the license could be waived or altered on a case-by-case basis.

Stallman puts himself 100% in the philosopher's chair. He seems to believe that any variation or compromise weakens his overall position. Every few months he starts a flame war just to satisfy his own guilt that rises from him feeling that he isn't doing enough to 'promote' free projects, even if the free projects don't exist yet, or are not as feature-full.

A few of us have a real love-hate relationship with Stallman. We love what he has accomplished. We hate how he accomplishes his goals.

The bottom line of all of this, is that Stallman is preaching to the wrong people. He should stick to press releases and such. Kernel developers just want to get work done. Any investment into writing a new source management system would be better served by improving the linux source code. If this wasn't so, the kernel developers wouldn't be kernel developers. They would be like me... source management developers... :-)

mark

[email protected]/[email protected]/[email protected] __________________________
.  .  _  ._  . .   .__    .  . ._. .__ .   . . .__  | Neighbourhood Coder
|\/| |_| |_| |/    |_     |\/|  |  |_  |   |/  |_   | 
|  | | | | \ | \   |__ .  |  | .|. |__ |__ | \ |__  | Ottawa, Ontario, Canada

  One ring to rule them all, one ring to find them, one ring to bring them all
                       and in the darkness bind them...

                           http://mark.mielke.cc/

Trever L. Adams wrote

You are being far too rational for this discussion.

While I may have my disagreements with Larry at times, I appreciate his patience in granting BitKeeper to the kernel developers.

RMS is a political idealist -- a good thing, in that such people help bring about shifts in society. But like all idealists, he's become trapped his dogma, fixated on finding battles to fight, even in other people's realms.

Scott Robert Ladd
Coyote Gulch Productions (http://www.coyotegulch.com)
Software Invention for High-Performance Computing

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Hi Richard.

You're ready for a small flame-war with Larry? 8-)

First I think, this list isn't the correct place for starting a bk-flame again.
But I also share your opinion, that it's time to write even a free client.
But how hard will it be? How big is the knowlege of the protocols bk uses? It'll be not easy, but for sure very interesting.

- --
Regards Michael Buesch
http://www.8ung.at/tuxsoft
Penguin on this machine: Linux 2.4.21 - i386

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In my mind it's absolutely not worth it. I believe there are non-commercial protocol gateways from which a copy of linux (complete with historical BK metadata) can be pulled and converted from.

Larry has his views whether 99.9999% of people disagree with him or not. He can change the protocol as he sees fit, and we can pull the source off of BK if we want.

He has stated before, it would be no skin off his balls (to paraphrase).

I'm trying hard to stay out of this, I think Richard may be trolling, but I need to make sure that people understand that what Richard is suggesting is violation of our license and copyright.

Our license states that you can't use BK if you are developing a similar system, i.e., a clone. Without using BK it's impossible to reverse engineer BK to create the clone. So your message seems to be saying "it would be appropriate at this point to violate the BitKeeper license in order to write a free client which talks with BitKeeper".

Are you really instructing people to go out and violate our license?

---
Larry McVoy              lm at bitmover.com          http://www.bitmover.com/lm

Again, to add to that, the very existence of BK2SVN and BK2CVS would seem support the assertion that the license/copyright allow "work-(sort-of)-alike" developers like (SVN guys) to use the protocol gateways. It only prevents them from using BK itself.

Really, the existence of the gateways was the end-all answer to the arguments folks had. The only thing really left is that the gateways operate on the charity of Larry.

So, just keep those repos up to date from the gateways, and if they stop working one day, then bitch. But understand, Larry is well within his rights in all his assertions; he's just quite a bit right of hard line GNU.

My understanding of the relevant case law in the United States is that
these types of restrictions are not allowed under copyright law itself. They've only been upheld when they're part of a sale contract. You can certainly argue that a click to an 'I Agree' link constitutes acceptance of a sale contract. But if someone sits down at a friend's computer that happens to have BK on it, or finds a copy of BK on a CD someone left at the lab, you would have a hard time arguing that they agreed to this contract.

See, for example, ProCD v. Zeidenberg:

"Copyright law forbids duplication, public performance, and so on, unless the person wishing to copy or perform the work gets permission; silence means a ban on copying. A copyright is a right against the world. Contracts, by contrast, generally affect only their parties; strangers may do as they please, so contracts do not create "exclusive rights." Someone who found a copy of SelectPhone(TM) on the street would not be affected by the shrinkwrap license - though the federal copyright laws of their own force would limit the finder's ability to copy or transmit the application program."

IANAL, and in any event, I don't think any court would look fondly on
someone who deliberately contrived a method to claim they're not subject to the license.

DS

Maybe you're right, but to the point of the conversation, 'taint worth it to fight it.

The worst thing anyone can do is go off half cocked, make a challenge, and *poof*, the protocol gateways disappear, because now Larry is spending his time & $$ with the lawsuit, and takes down the protocol gateways.

So, in essence, I say pick the battles that are worth fighting, and then only the battles that are worth winning.

Actually your license is simply irrelevant in most of thre world. You aren't allowed to forbid reverse engineering for interoperability.

actually I think that your case for ignoring the 'no reverse engineering' would be far better if you paid for a bitkeeper license, but when you are being allowed to use it for free on the condition that you use it specific ways (no reverse engineering and public access to changeset info) saying that you will eliminate complying with those terms but still get to use it for free isn't being very reasonable.

David Lang

http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=linux-kernel&m=100374609914587&w=2

2.2.20pre11
o Security fixes
| Details censored in accordance with the US DMCA

And there's the resignation letter from ALS from a certain LKML regular, too....

Now what's this about the "simply irrelevant"? Now admittedly the DMCA issues were on the criminal side of the legal system rather than the civil side, but the same "You land at the airport and have a chat with the sheriff's deputy" issue still applies - it's merely a lawsuit rather than an arrest warrant...

"in most of the world"

If everyone spent the time replacing bitkeeper instead of beating up Larry they'd get a lot further. I appreciate beating up Larry is more fun but....

Well, here in the US the right to reverse engineer may be gone. It lost out in a recent case. Hopefully that isn't telling of the future and future court cases.

Long live that right everywhere, even if the US sticks its legal head up a dark, dark tunnel.

Trever
--
"Love is friendship set on fire." -- French Proverb

"Judge, I want to violate this license on this product that I got for free because it's not free enough".

"Judge, we give it out for free and we also developed technology to transfer the data out of our product and into a GPLed product, we do that at our expense and even host the competing GPLed repos for free and they still want to violate the license"

Who do you think is going to win that one?

Besides, have you considered that it is that license you appear to dislike so much which provides for the product, the hosting, the free public machines, the support, all of that? It's a pile of money and time and I don't see RMS steppng forward with an open checkbook.

The license means we have a revenue stream. We use a significant portion of that revenue stream to help Linux. If the revenue stream goes away then so do the services we provide to you for free. They obviously have value or you wouldn't be using them.

---
Larry McVoy              lm at bitmover.com          http://www.bitmover.com/lm

Oh come on, you use Linux for testing and improving your software and spin it in such a way that you do something charitable. From all your mailings on this list I don't get the impression that you would do anything that is not to improve your profit. I bet you can tax deduct all that money you allegedly spend on linux and thereby increase your profit.

Anyway, this is no subject for the kernel list. Let those who want to support Larry use bitkeeper and those who rather use free software use something else.

Marcus

/--------------------------------------------------------------------\
| Dr. Marcus O.C. Metzler        |                                   |
|--------------------------------|-----------------------------------|
| [email protected]            | http://www.metzlerbros.de/        |
\--------------------------------------------------------------------/

"Judge, our current German copyright law explicitely states that such a
clause is void."

cu
Adrian

       "Is there not promise of rain?" Ling Tan asked suddenly out
        of the darkness. There had been need of rain for many days.
       "Only a promise," Lao Er said.
                                       Pearl S. Buck - Dragon Seed

No, it isn't. Your case law is based on a *purchase* or *lease* of a product for *money*. If you paid us money, you'd have a point. But you didn't. You get to use the product for free and until there is some case law which says otherwise, we get to make any rules we like. And our rules say you can't reverse engineer. Too bad for you if you don't like it, I'm not exactly overflowing with sympathy for someone who paid nothing and is now complaining that they aren't allowed to reverse engineer and steal what they didn't pay for.

---
Larry McVoy              lm at bitmover.com          http://www.bitmover.com/lm

There is no case law in Germany. Case law is somethig that is only used in England and the USA.

In Germany there are laws for _everything_. Rules like who owns the swarm of bees when several swarms of bees unite aren't made at court, they are explicitely written in laws.

German judges don't read 200 years old judicial decisions, they read written laws.

Please ask a lawyer about the differences between the English/US and the continental Europe law system if you don't believe me.

The current German copyright law doesn't talk about money. If you allow someone to use a copy the law explicitely states that some kind of contract clauses (e.g. a complete prohibition of disassembling) are simply void.

cu
Adrian

       "Is there not promise of rain?" Ling Tan asked suddenly out
        of the darkness. There had been need of rain for many days.
       "Only a promise," Lao Er said.
                                       Pearl S. Buck - Dragon Seed

Alan pointed out to me that the EU rules are for interoperability and they do not allow reverse engineering for the purposes of learning how a product works.

Since BK can export any and *all* data and metadata from a one line command, it's awfully hard to make the argument that you are reverse engineering for interoperability. You can get your data as flat files, diffs, unified diffs, context diffs. You can get your checkin comments in any format you want. It's trivial to get data in and out of BK.

You can even get all of that from a web server so you don't have to sully your hands with evil BK software.

So where is the law that says it is OK to reverse engineer when the product already provides everything you could possibly want for interoperability?

---
Larry McVoy              lm at bitmover.com          http://www.bitmover.com/lm

Current German copyright law says things like that clauses that forbit to gather information about the ideas behind a program through normal program usage are void.

IANAL, and we are entering an area where you need a lawyer that reads both your licensing terms and the copyright law to tell exactly what is allowed and what isn't allowed.

My main point is:
There are countries that have laws that are different from US laws (yes, there's a world outside the USA...). If I download software from your server it is possible that my local law is the one that is valid for the contract between us (independent of whether I pay for the software or whether you give it for free) and my local laws might be different from the jurisdiction in the USA.

cu
Adrian

       "Is there not promise of rain?" Ling Tan asked suddenly out
        of the darkness. There had been need of rain for many days.
       "Only a promise," Lao Er said.
                                       Pearl S. Buck - Dragon Seed

Let's try and simplify this because having a legal discussion is pointless. Our position is that we gave something out for free with an understanding that you wouldn't reverse engineer it. Regardless of your legal rights or lack thereof, should you attempt to reverse engineer BK we'll simply stop giving BK out for free. See? Simple.

---
Larry McVoy              lm at bitmover.com          http://www.bitmover.com/lm

No, it's not simple (and this part, unlike much of the rest of this discussion, is relevant to this list). If you stopped giving it out for free, then it would cease to be a viable tool for Linux development.

-Tupshin

It's called "Killing the goose that lays the golden eggs".

And although Larry has his philanthropic side, if he has to decide between "helping Linux development" and "making sure the bills get paid".....

THIS IS NOT A BITKEEPER LIST.

Thanks,

Jeff

LINUX KERNEL IS NOT A BITKEEPER MAILING LIST.

Regards,

Jeff

Now that *is* legal, and reasonable (in the legal sense) as well.

-- Jim Howard <[email protected]>

You know guys, Larry would spend a lot less time having to make threats like this if people didn't start off by saying "Let's see how we can get a free
Bitkeeper". I've seen *LOTS* of philosophical posturing and arguing about
whether it's moral to rip Larry's software off, and what countries make it legal to do so.

I've only seen *ONE* person (who's name I've forgotten but who needs to be praised) suggest finding some *FUNDING* for Larry so he doesn't worry about his revenue stream getting hosed.

So Larry - *IF* funding was there, would you consider a business model similar to Hans Reiser's?

I'd consider anything which resulted in a healthy business. The choices we've made to date have been 100% focussed on staying healthy so we can grow as a company and continue to support Linux (and the other open source guys, but I personally only care about Linus - he's unique), and our commercial customers. We've been approached by investors and companies which wished to buy us outright and I passed on both because it was clear that they wanted one thing: money. They would have shut down the free use of BK in less than a day after the deal was done.

The thing you need to consider is that the Linux community is not that different than our commercial customers - both need us to be healthy so that we can support them. Healthy costs a lot of money.

Part of the problem is that people are extremely short sighted. Until we gave you BK nobody had any idea that a system like this was possible. We can see a lot of problems with BK and a lot of problems in the development process of Linux (and other systems) that maybe we can help make easier. When people think about funding us they think about the $$$ it would take to have a couple of guys doing bug fixes. That's not good enough. We need the dollars to do the next thing that helps make development work better. BK is fine but it is not the end all answer. There is a lot of work in bug tracking, project management, review tools, web interfaces, etc. We're not going to be interested in any business model that means we get enough money to fix some bugs but not enough to solve the next set of problems.

---
Larry McVoy              lm at bitmover.com          http://www.bitmover.com/lm

THIS IS NOT A BITKEEPER MAILING LIST.

Thank you,

Jeff

(I spared the list a couple of messages by forgetting to CC 'em....)

I infer a creeping sense of humor.

-- Jim Howard <[email protected]>

Hi!

Its not free at all.

Alan is right, that parts of licence agreement are irrelevant in Europe, and what RMS is suggesting is perfectly legal here. Like it or not. Don't try to make "RMS suggested something ilegal" case. Thanx,
Pavel

When do you have a heart between your knees?
[Johanka's followup: and *two* hearts?]

I've told other people before and I'll tell you again:
Please, pretty please, leave linux-kernel for discussions about the linux kernel and leave the bitkeeper flames for those that enjoy electronic pyrotechnic.

Apart from that: Larry is right. Noone cared about crappy ol' cvs until bk came alone and showed what everyone already knew. If you didn't have to improve cvs back then, it is still as good as it was, so thy improve it now? Pure jealousy?

Jörn

The cost of changing business rules is much more expensive for software
than for a secretaty.
-- unknown

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fredag 18. juli 2003, 23:06, skrev Jörn Engel:

No, I think we'd improve CVS because bk came along and showed us what we already knew.

Bitkeeper *is* better, but as long as the ideas those improvements are based on don't get patented there is no reason for us not to claim them for ourselves.

Summa summarum:
Having a Free CVS is good.
Having a useful BitKeeper is sometimes better. Having a Free CVS with all the features of BK would be best.

- - Svein Ove Aas
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On 07.19, Svein Ove Aas wrote:
[...]

Oh, please, stop thinking BitKeeper is the best thing since sliced bread !!! I have never used BK. I just use CVS as client. I have not looked at SVN. BK sure surpasses every other SCM tool.
But please, stop thinking about BK clones, BK features, all BK.

As I read in some posts in this thread, people is doing useful work on a free SCM. Could you all put your efforts on generating a list of features/requirements you would like for a SCM system specialized for kernel development, and send them to the developers, instead of arguing about legal impact of reverse-engineering BK. And let the developers think about protocols, work flow, ways to do things, and so on. They can find a way not even similiar to the BK one, and even better...

That way perhaps in one year you could suck data from BK and at least try a new system...

J.A. Magallon <[email protected]>      \                 Software is like sex:
werewolf.able.es                         \           It's better when it's free
Mandrake Linux release 9.2 (Cooker) for i586
Linux 2.4.22-pre6-jam1m (gcc 3.3.1 (Mandrake Linux 9.2 3.3.1-0.3mdk))

These threads are getting annoying :-<

I agree. As vger postmaster I think I'll start shitcanning them, but unfortunately most of these threads startup while I'm sleeping so it's hard for me to get a regexp in place to block the thread.

So, let me put it this way, if you start a BK flame thread it is _YOU_ who I will blacklist from posting to vger.kernel.org

No more horribly-offtopic RMS trolls? :)

Jeff

Hi folks,

I'm against Richard inflaming the situation without really helping, but since the issue's come up again, I just thought I'd put in a good word for arch here:

The arch project is no longer just a bunch of shell scripts. Tom Lord has rewritten it in C (and called the C version 'tla'), and it's self-hosting. Developers are actually contributing to development using arch itself now. These seem like very big milestones to me.

There's still quite a bit of work to do on it (and a steep learning curve), but personally, I think it's the project with the best chance of success. Anyone who's interested in this issue might consider contributing to arch development instead of duking it out on lkml.

Be well,
Zack

Zack Brown