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

Tom Sightler
2003-03-14T17:48:19Z

On Fri, 2003-03-14 at 11:58, Larry McVoy wrote:
> > So are you exhibiting worse corporate behavior than Microsoft? It would
> > seem so.
>
> Microsoft doesn't give you Windows for free. We wrote BK from scratch,
> unlike any of the distro vendors, so saying they give out their stuff
> for free isn't a valid comparison either.

But now you are changing your own argument, it was you who wanted to see
examples of Redhat or SuSE not pursuing such things, I gave you an
example of Microsoft not pursuing such thing and now your saying that
not fair because they didn't give anything away, well, it was your
request to see such comparisons.

Also, here's a link to a release announcement for Mandrake 5.2
http://lwn.net/1999/0128/mandrake.html if you look at the "What is
Mandrake-Linux" you will see the example of Mandrake claiming 100%
Redhat compatibility.

ASPLinux also claims 100% Redhat compatibility on their website. Yellow
Dog Linux is a Redhat based distribution and uses that exact term on
their website.

> We built a product, we gave out for free to help the kernel, everyone
> agrees it is helping, and we get constantly attacked. You might stop
> to consider that the smartest thing we could do would be to give up
> but the cost of giving up is slowing down kernel development and
> contributing to Linus' burnout.

No, you haven't really given the product away for free. You have given
us the use of the tool for free, with a lot of strings attached, similar
to Microsoft giving IE away for free. Many people believe that the cost
to the community of using BitKeeper is much higher than the cost of
kernel development moving more slowly.

BTW, I'm not really against the use of BitKeeper for kernel development,
I just think that in this case you're being a little unreasonable. I
was more understanding when his initial post claimed to be a "clone of
BitKeeper" which was certainly not the case, but as a "tool for reading
BitKeeper repositories" that seems to be reasonable. You argument that
it doesn't support all of the features seems pointless, of course it
doesn't, it's the first release of an open product in development, it
doesn't have to support all of the features. WINE still doesn't
implement many features of the Win32 API, but that is the goal of the
project and they can state that.

Later,
Tom