Re: Never ever use word BitKeeper if Larry does not like you

Davide Libenzi
2003-03-14T18:27:56Z

On Fri, 14 Mar 2003, Jeff Garzik wrote:

> On Fri, Mar 14, 2003 at 09:09:15AM -0800, Davide Libenzi wrote:
> > Ok, let's try again. Because honestly I'm pretty sick of this BK saga on
> > lkml. It's maybe time to understand if people here is against Larry or
> > against the BK license itself. It seems to me that there's the request of
> > a read-only tool that is able to read BK repositories to fetch the latest
> > kernel trees. I proposed before to Larry and to lkml to have Larry to
> > release a read-only ( read-only here means, able only to fetch sources and
> > related information ) BK binary under different licensing. Why this
> > couldn't solve the problem if Larry and the anti-BK movement will find an
> > agreement on the license ? Larry, is it possible to release such tool
> > under a less strict license ?
>
> No.
>
> Because, in order to properly export data, you have to not understand
> the BK file format, but you also have precisely follow BK's method
> for creating the "weave" of changesets which produces a valid [GNU
> patch / changeset / whatever].
>
> Thus, even to have an open source BK export tool requires that key
> BK algorithms be open sourced.

Precised that the CVS export works for this purpose, why should you need
to open source algos to simply fetch sources from BK repos ? And, I was
talking about a binary, not source.

- Davide