Re: BK is *evil* corporate software

tom_gall
2002-10-07T21:22:45Z

On Monday, October 7, 2002, at 03:44 PM, Pavel Machek wrote:

> Hi!
>
>> O Please! As the person that started this thread this is way way way
>> way out there and quite frankly I find offensive.
>>
>> I do NOT honestly think that Larry made the change to the license that
>> he did for the express purpose of milking some set of companies out of
>> $$$$. That's just dumb.
>
> Maybe it is doing for purpose of slowing down subversion/CVS/arch
> development. Thats about as bad.

Bah!

>> Granted it's a different kind of license, (IE Microsoft doesn't have a
>> clause in IE that says Netscape developers can't use IE) but hey, it's
>> Larry's company and he's perfectly in his rights to do so. It is
>> truely a good thing that Larry is allowing some set of us in the open
>> source community to use his product without costs.
>
> Good thing for who?

Those developers who can use BitKeeper in their work, regardless if
they paid for it or not.

> Good thing for Larry? I don't know.

Well that's for Larry to decide. I would hope that the benefits would
be there for him.

> Good thing for us? I don't think so.

Don't look a productivity gain in the mouth.

> Good thing for subversion developers? Definitely not.

In this case yes are you correct. It's not good for them or for
related technologies. OTOH, you'll get no break from companies such as
Microsoft. Wanna clone MS Word, well you're buying it to do that.
Course generally there's the reverse engineering clause.

I do not understand in any way shape or form why you THINK it's
reasonable for a company to give a competitor a leg up on putting them
out of business. It's not. While it is normal for open source projects
to cross pollinate, this is not the case here.

BitKeeper is not open source software so you can't subject it to the
same standards that you apply to Open source works.

Regards,

Tom