Re: BitBucket: GPL-ed KitBeeper clone

Larry McVoy
2003-04-09T00:45:47Z

On Wed, Apr 09, 2003 at 12:19:49AM +0100, Jamie Lokier wrote:
> Larry McVoy wrote about unreleased improvements to Bitkeeper:
> > [...] we're worried about the open source guys stealing them.
>
> Seriously, do you see it as "stealing" if someone mimics your best ideas?

Yes. It is not clear to me that open source community has realized that
it is much harder to come up with the ideas than it is to copy them.
Much of the activity in open source community is copying, providing a
GPLed version of some commercial tool.

The problem is that that those things which you wish to copy represent
easily 10x-100x more work than it would take to copy them. So we spend
the order[s] of magnitude more money to get a good answer and you copy it.
In many cases, before we can recoup our investment.

The short answer is yes, it's stealing in our eyes. If you're such a
good programmer, how about you go figure out the SCM answers without
leveraging our work? By not honoring that request, you are begging us
to stop improving the free version of BK. Also known as "cutting off
your nose to spite your face".
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Larry McVoy lm at bitmover.com http://www.bitmover.com/lm