BK is *evil* corporate software [was Re: New BK License Problem?]
Quoted 13 lines · Larry McVoy
if you have 3-5 developers there is no reason to not use CVS,
it works well enough. ...
OK, now let's look at it as you grow. Most of our customers are in the 25-100 developer range. They move very quickly and have lots of parallelism in the code. So things like work flow and merging are critical, if that doesn't work, the whole team slows down. Let's say we have a 60 seat sale. That's $90K/year for BK. Let's say the engineers cost $100K/each (it may be lower where you are but it's more like $180-220 here when you add in building/mgmt/all the other overhead). So that's $6M/year in engineers. The BK cost is 1.5% of that. You say that your guys are $50K/year? OK, so we're at 3% of that. The point is that if BK makes your team 3% more productive, it costs zero.
Quoted 2 lines
And none of that includes the hardware costs, which are dramatically cheaper for BK, it works on a laptop. Clearcase doesn't.
Larry is spot on. I evaluated Clearcase, Bitkeeper, and Perforce recently
for an 80 developer shop currently suffering with SourceSafe. Clearcase was ridiculously expensive and complex; I would never use it. Bitkeeper appeared to have *exactly* the features we wanted, and the price was not out of our range. We eventually settled on trying Perforce for a while because we know it could do most of what we needed, but it was a really tough call. Larry took the time to make sure we understood the issues, and I have a lot of respect for him.
Anyone who says Larry is evil is smoking crack. He's good people.
- Dan