Re: BK is *evil* corporate software [was Re: New BK License Problem?]

Dan Kegel
2002-10-10T00:20:41Z

Larry McVoy <lm@bitmover.com> wrote:
> 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.
>
> 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