From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S261962AbTD0XQ0 (ORCPT ); Sun, 27 Apr 2003 19:16:26 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S261977AbTD0XQ0 (ORCPT ); Sun, 27 Apr 2003 19:16:26 -0400 Received: from smtp.bitmover.com ([192.132.92.12]:13201 "EHLO smtp.bitmover.com") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S261962AbTD0XQY (ORCPT ); Sun, 27 Apr 2003 19:16:24 -0400 Date: Sun, 27 Apr 2003 16:28:35 -0700 From: Larry McVoy To: Alan Cox Cc: Larry McVoy , Ross Vandegrift , Chris Adams , Linux Kernel Mailing List Subject: Re: Why DRM exists [was Re: Flame Linus to a crisp!] Message-ID: <20030427232835.GM23068@work.bitmover.com> Mail-Followup-To: Larry McVoy , Alan Cox , Larry McVoy , Ross Vandegrift , Chris Adams , Linux Kernel Mailing List References: <20030427183553.GA955879@hiwaay.net> <20030427185037.GA23581@work.bitmover.com> <20030427220717.GA24991@willow.seitz.com> <20030427223255.GH23068@work.bitmover.com> <1051481114.15485.33.camel@dhcp22.swansea.linux.org.uk> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: <1051481114.15485.33.camel@dhcp22.swansea.linux.org.uk> User-Agent: Mutt/1.4i X-MailScanner-Information: Please contact the ISP for more information X-MailScanner: Found to be clean X-MailScanner-SpamCheck: not spam, SpamAssassin (score=0.5, required 4.5, DATE_IN_PAST_06_12) Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org On Sun, Apr 27, 2003 at 11:05:15PM +0100, Alan Cox wrote: > Your economic model is flawed because if something needs doing enough > someone will pay to do it. The moment the value exceeds the cost it > should happen. Explain to me how BK would have happened under your (non flawed) model. Before we gave it to you, you had no idea how to do it. It cost millions to get it to the point that you could see that it was valuable by using it. If I had said "Hey, Red Hat, how about you give me $8M so I can go build you the perfect SCM tool" you would have laughed your ass off. As would any other company, the amount of money it takes to do something new is not a working amount for a single customer. Under your model, only incremental change will occur, no customer is ever going to fund the large amounts required for truly new work. > As to using one companies lessons to do your work, how much did BK learn > from what *didn't* work well in Clearcase. Rather a lot I believe. That > learning fuels innovation. Maybe it fuels you, it certainly doesn't fuel me. As far as I know, nobody who works here has ever run clearcase or looked at their file formats. All of the clearcase knowledge I have has come indirectly through customers who have told me how it works. At this point I have a pretty good idea how it works but at no time did we ever attempt to emulate or improve on clearcase. A lot of people who work here have commented that they like working here because we don't back away from the hard problems. We don't work at things by going "hmm, clearcase does it this way, let's see if we can do better". Linus told us he'd use BK when it was the best and what we thought he meant "best" meant "it can be no better", not "well, it's better than all the other crap out there". The way we work is to imagine perfection and then try and build that. I'm really not interested in how CVS does it or how ClearCase does it, I already know they do it wrong. I'm much more interested in the definition of "best". What is the best answer? OK, let's build that. The fact that we took that approach is the main reason we're in business today, there are literally hundreds of competitors out there, so if we are only slightly better do you think anyone would know we existed? Not a chance. I'll bet you I can name at least 20 and probably more like 200 SCM companies you've never heard of. We weren't interested in being number 201 in that list. -- --- Larry McVoy lm at bitmover.com http://www.bitmover.com/lm