Re: [BK] upgrade will be needed

Larry McVoy
2005-02-14T22:57:12Z

On Mon, Feb 14, 2005 at 11:24:43PM +0100, Gerold Jury wrote:
> Hi Larry
> Hi Everyone
>
> Do you think it is possible to make a split licence that will distinguish
> between active changes and passive watching/tracking ?

A lot of people have told us to create two products, the free product
and the commercial product, and license the free product with standard
licensing terms. The expectation is that we would somehow make the free
product less desirable so that people bought the commercial product.

That's an excellent suggestion if our only goal is to make money, that
makes the free product sort of a teaser and the commercial product the
real deal. However, the goal really is to help the open source
community, Linux in particular. If we give away crippled software then
all the people who say we are just a money grubbing corporation are
more or less correct. At that point we aren't giving away the good
stuff and it was always the goal that you got the latest and greatest
because that's what can do you the most good.

However, it sure sounds like the noisy people would be a lot happier
with a stripped down BK that didn't have as many of the restrictions.
And a possible out for even the open source users is that they buy seats
if they really need the more powerful features. Or we could donate
some on a case by case basis.

If the hackers who are using BK can reach agreement that it would be
better if the BK they had didn't move forward unless they got commercial
seats then we could start moving towards a license on the free product
that was less restrictive. What that would mean is that the BK you have
is basically it, we'd not advance it other than keeping it up to date
with the protocol and/or file formats of the commercial version. If you
think BK is good enough, fast enough, done enough that you don't want
what we have coming down the pike we can go that route.

I suspect that the heavy lifters really would like a faster BK with more
features that help them get their job done but the rank and file could
care less, they just want checkin/checkout.
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Larry McVoy lm at bitmover.com http://www.bitkeeper.com