Re: Is the BitKeeper network protocol documented?

Larry McVoy
2003-01-18T06:30:26Z

I've sent Jamie mail asking him why he things 3(d) is a problem for him,
we'll see what he says. If he's working on things that compete with BK
then the answer is no, if he's not, then there is no problem.

We want to help the kernel team, that should be obvious. I draw the line
where helping the kernel team hurts BitMover, as would any of you in my
position. Fortunately, it's pretty rare that anyone talented enough to
work on the kernel also wants to work on source management.

We could change the license to have the standard legalese which says you
can't reverse engineer, etc. If the community at large would prefer that,
we could discuss it. I suspect that when you realize the implications of
that legalese, the BKL will seem a lot nicer by comparison. Would you
rather have something like:

You may not yourself and may not permit or enable anyone to: (i) modify or
translate the Software; (ii) reverse engineer, decompile, or disassemble the
Software or otherwise reduce the Software to a form understandable by humans,
except to the extent this restriction is expressly prohibited by applicable
law notwithstanding this limitation; (iii) rent, lease, loan, resell or cre-
ate derivative works based on the Software; (iv) merge the Software with
another product; (v) separate the Software into its component parts; (vi)
copy the Software, except (A) as expressly provided herein and (B) as reason-
ably necessary for back up and recovery purposes; or (vii) remove or obscure
any proprietary rights notices, labels, copyrights, trademarks, servicemarks,
confidentiality notices and/or restricted rights notices on or in the Soft-
ware.

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Larry McVoy lm at bitmover.com http://www.bitmover.com/lm