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

Jeff Garzik
2003-03-14T18:18:32Z

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.

Jeff