Re: New BK License Problem?

Larry McVoy
2002-10-05T19:37:51Z

> patches in the kernel every day. Now this isn't possible anymore without

Nonsense. There are all sorts of people who have taken the BK trees and
made the patch snapshots available on timely basis. Garzik's done it,
Woodhouse has done it, Rik has done it, I'm sure there are piles more.
The kernel is GPLed and we have no control of the kernel source. You
can get at the source just as easily as ever, in fact, I'm 99.9% sure
that your access is much better than it used to be because Linus makes
the changes available on bkbits much more often than he used to make
pre-patches and/or releases.

Yeah, if you want to try and make BK go away then the answer is that you
don't get the benefits of BK while you are trying to accomplish your goals.
That's not going to change, scream all you want. Those are the rules.

You have no grounds for complaint because anyone can do the bk export -tpatch
to get you the exact same patch you would have gotten if you had asked them
for it before they ever used BK. If you hate BK or the license or just want
to be traditional, our position is that you should be no worse off than you
would have been if the kernel wasn't in BK. What you are complaining about
is that you want access to the *improvements* in the development process
while you are working on tools which would damage the company who provided
those improvements. That's asking too much. You can live with what you
used to live with and work on competing products or you can benefit from the
new tools, but not both.

Our position is clear, it's not unreasonable, it affects very few kernel
developers, and it doesn't even make those developers any worse off than
they were before we showed up. All we are saying is that you don't get
to use our tools if you are trying to rewrite our tools. I don't care if
your name is Linus, Alan, or Ulrich, those rules are uniform for everyone.
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Larry McVoy lm at bitmover.com http://www.bitmover.com/lm