Re: New BK License Problem?

Ingo Molnar
2002-10-06T15:21:04Z

On Sun, 6 Oct 2002, Larry McVoy wrote:

> > this kind of sudden change in Larry's written opinion within 24 hours is
> > that makes this whole issue dangerous.
>
> What change?

i wanted to say 'apparent change' - as the issue presents itself to me,
based on the incomplete snippets of information i have on this mailing
list. Your first statement reads:

> The clause is specifically designed to target those companies which
> produce or sell commercial SCM systems. [...] The open source developers
> have nothing to worry about.

this reads to me: "even if i'm an SCM developer i am using BK fairly as
long as i license my SCM code under an open-source license." Is this an
incorrect interpretation of your words?

the second statement:

> > Larry, I develop for the Subversion project. Does that mean my license
> > to use bitkeeper is revoked?
>
> Yes. It has been since we shipped that license or when you started
> working on Subversion, whichever came last.

Subversion itself appears to be licensed under a Apache-ish license, so a
cursory interpretation of the first statement qualifies it as an
'open-source' project. It might or might not be worth anything, it might
or might not be related to a commercial entity otherwise, like each and
every other open-source project - commercial activities and open-source do
not exclude each other.

Ingo