Re: Bitkeeper outragem, old and new

Larry McVoy
2002-10-14T00:12:55Z

Our position:

1) No free licenses for our competition, they can buy them if they like.
2) The software is not open source because the open source business model
doesn't have a prayer of supporting the development costs.
3) If you had built a decent system instead of sitting around and whining,
we could be doing something else instead of sitting around listening
to your whining.

On Sun, Oct 13, 2002 at 06:48:22PM -0400, Richard Stallman wrote:
> The new restrictions on Bitkeeper, saying that people who contribute
> to CVS or Subversion and even companies that distribute them cannot
> even run Bitkeeper, have sparked outrage.
> restrictions are new, their spirit fits perfectly with the previous
> Bitkeeper license.
>
> The spirit of the Bitkeeper license is the spirit of the whip hand.
> It is the spirit that says, "You have no right to use Bitkeeper, only
> temporary privileges that we can revoke. Be grateful that we allow
> you to use Bitkeeper. Be grateful, and don't do anything we dislike,
> or we may revoke those privileges." It is the spirit of proprietary
> software. Every non-free license is designed to control the users
> more or less. Outrage at this spirit is the reason for the free
> software movement. (By contrast, the open source movement prefers to
> play down this same outrage.)
>
> If the latest outrage brings the spirit of the non-free Bitkeeper
> license into clear view, perhaps that will be enough to convince the
> developers of Linux to stop using Bitkeeper for Linux development.
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--
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Larry McVoy lm at bitmover.com http://www.bitmover.com/lm