Re: BK kernel workflow

Larry McVoy
2004-11-01T04:58:16Z

On Sun, Oct 31, 2004 at 10:16:44PM -0500, Kyle Moffett wrote:
> I do not know for certain, but I will guess that Pavel has not done
> anything blatantly illegal or violated the BK license in any way you
> can prove. I am also guessing that he has not signed any additional
> contracts or EULAs with you.

You guess a lot. You guess wrong. A simple google groups search on
Pavel's name and BitKeeper will give you more than enough data to see
why Pavel has given up any right to use BK.

> You were stating earlier that you are not trying to trap people into BK,
> but these statements appear to be much to the contrary of that position.

Look, Kyle, I've never heard from you before this thread. However,
I've been around the Linux kernel, helping in various ways, for
more than a decade. Yes, a lot of people question the BK license,
but my participation here predates that by at least 6 or 7 years.
I'd suggest you do a little research before you start making comments
about my motives. If I were some sleazy marketing guy showing up out
of nowhere, much as you have shown up, and the first thing I was doing
was more or less "give me all your money", you might have a point.
But that's not the case. Yes, lots of people beat me up about the BK
license and they may have a point, it's not in the open source spirit,
I get it. But that doesn't give you the right to start jumping in.
At least not the right to have me take that at face value.

I guess what I'm saying is that I'll take crap from Andrea and Pavel
and Roman because they've been around for a while and while I don't
agree with them on the BK issue I respect their work and their position.
I'm not about to take crap from you, however, until you have contributed
as much here as they have. No offense, I'm not trying to play old boy
games, I'm just saying that you need to get a little more background
before you spout off. If I were coming over to the Mac world or the
Windows world and yelling I'd expect exactly the same sort of pushback.
I'll admit that I haven't been reading the list that much lately so
maybe you rock the Linux world and I just don't know about it, in
which case I apologize, point me at the body of work and I'll start
reading.

> One could theorize that the "preferred form" for the kernel is a tar.gz
> or tar.bz2 file of the sources, and since you distribute through BK
> _all_ versions of the kernel, you must also provide a way to get the
> "preferred form" for any particular version. I realize that this is
> somewhat difficult, but if you are going to use contractual crap to
> restrict Pavel's rights to get at his BK data, then you probably ought to
> offer to send anybody a tar.gz or tar.bz2 of any version of the sources
> at any particular time.

This would be another example of you not having done your homework. You
can get that from bkbits.net today, albeit rate limited so the non-BK users
don't screw up the BK users.
--
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Larry McVoy lm at bitmover.com http://www.bitkeeper.com