Re: Bitkeeper

[Larry McVoy <lm@bitmover.com>]

On Sat, Jul 19, 2003 at 08:30:53PM -0400, Valdis.Kletnieks@vt.edu wrote:
> So Larry - *IF* funding was there, would you consider a business model similar
> to Hans Reiser's?

I'd consider anything which resulted in a healthy business.  The choices
we've made to date have been 100% focussed on staying healthy so we can
grow as a company and continue to support Linux (and the other open
source guys, but I personally only care about Linus - he's unique),
and our commercial customers.  We've been approached by investors and
companies which wished to buy us outright and I passed on both because
it was clear that they wanted one thing: money.  They would have shut
down the free use of BK in less than a day after the deal was done.

The thing you need to consider is that the Linux community is not that
different than our commercial customers - both need us to be healthy so
that we can support them.  Healthy costs a lot of money.

Part of the problem is that people are extremely short sighted.  Until we
gave you BK nobody had any idea that a system like this was possible.
We can see a lot of problems with BK and a lot of problems in the
development process of Linux (and other systems) that maybe we can help
make easier.  When people think about funding us they think about the
$$$ it would take to have a couple of guys doing bug fixes.  That's not
good enough.  We need the dollars to do the next thing that helps make
development work better.  BK is fine but it is not the end all answer.
There is a lot of work in bug tracking, project management, review tools,
web interfaces, etc.  We're not going to be interested in any business
model that means we get enough money to fix some bugs but not enough to
solve the next set of problems.
-- 
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Larry McVoy              lm at bitmover.com          http://www.bitmover.com/lm