Re: Bitkeeper outragem, old and new

Kristian Koehntopp
2002-10-14T06:43:37Z

On Sun, Oct 13, 2002 at 05:18:40PM -0700, Larry McVoy wrote:
> 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.

Larry, rest assured that exactly this is happinging right now
all over the world. You are not feeling the backlash now,
because it takes time, but it will happen, and you made pretty
much sure of that.

You are pulling a Qt. By changing the license to BK to
discourage development of BK alternatives you made sure that
Subversion and other projects get plenty of new and highly
motivated developers - you actually encouraged the development
of BK alternatives just like the non-free license of Qt as the
foundation of KDE spawned the Gnome project.

The clock just started ticking and when we reevaluate this
discussion in one or two years time, the complete strategic
stupidity of this particular license change from BKs POV view
will be evident.

Kristian