Re: [ANNOUNCE] BK->CVS (real time mirror)

H. Peter Anvin
2003-03-12T04:28:51Z

Followup to: <20030312034330.GA9324@work.bitmover.com>
By author: Larry McVoy <lm@bitmover.com>
In newsgroup: linux.dev.kernel
>
> If all of this sounds nice, it is. It was a lot of work for us to do
> this and you might be wondering why we bothered. Well, for a couple of
> reasons. First of all, it was only recently that I realized that because
> BK is not free software some people won't run BK to get data out of BK.
> It may be dense on my part, but I simply did not anticipate that people
> would be that extreme, it never occurred to me. We did a ton of work to
> make sure anyone could get their data out of BK but you do have to run
> BK to get the data. I never thought of people not being willing to run
> BK to get at the data. Second, we have maintained SCCS compatible file
> formats so that there would be another way to get the data out of BK.
> This has held us back in terms of functionality and performance. I had
> thought there was some value in the SCCS format but recent discussions
> on this list have convinced me that without the changeset information
> the file format doesn't have much value.
>

I can only speak for myself, but I didn't mind until the license ended
up having the "unless you hack on other tools" exception in it.
Personally, I value my freedom to hack on whatever I want a lot more
than the convenience of BK. This is a personal choice on my part and
may sound "extreme" to you, and other people have made other
tradeoffs, but for me freedom was the reason I started hacking Linux
instead of becoming a Win32 geek.

Having this capability available will certainly make life better for
everyone involved. Besides, "we won't hold your data hostage" is
actually a pretty nice selling argument.

>
> Our goal is to provide the data in a way that you can get at it without
> being dependent on us or BK in any way. As soon as we have this
> debugged, I'd like to move the CVS repositories to kernel.org (if I can
> get HPA to agree) and then you'll have the revision history and can live
> without the fear of the "don't piss Larry off license". Quite frankly,
> we don't like the current situation any better than many of you, so if
> this addresses your concerns that will take some pressure off of us.
>

I'm sure we can work something out. However, at the moment
zeus.kernel.org, our main server with lots and lots of bandwidth, is
starting to run into its limits, so I can't promise *when* that will
happen. Just putting in another server

-hpa
--
<hpa@transmeta.com> at work, <hpa@zytor.com> in private!
"Unix gives you enough rope to shoot yourself in the foot."
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