Re: [PATCH] Remove Bitkeeper documentation from Linux tree

Larry McVoy
2002-04-20T17:42:38Z

Oh, my. A couple of thoughts:

a) if it would ease the incredible silent (?) seething anguish of Daniel and
others, I'd be happy to post a copy of Jeff's docs on the bitkeeper.com
website someplace and you could replace the patch with a pointer to that.
Seems silly but if it makes the uproar go away...

b) To all of the "silently seething" folks, build a better answer for
free and the kernel team will switch in a heartbeat. How about you
think of BitKeeper as a stepping stone, a temporary thing until a
better answer appears? It doesn't even have to be better, just good
enough.

We built BK to make the key people more efficient. To some extent, it
is doing that. We'll keep trying to make it help make those people more
efficient. That's *good* for the kernel. Which was always the goal.

I'm terribly sorry that this product space doesn't generate enough
consulting business that it can support itself in a politically correct
way, but it doesn't. Get over it. You either get crap tools or you get
tools that have a business model. In this space, the GPL doesn't work,
you need some other way to pay for the work.

If you don't agree, by all means, feel free to *prove* me wrong by
designing, implementing, and supporting a better (or as good)
answer. That is what Linus has said, and I agree, and the "silently
seething" folks need to either put up or go back to being silent.

A thing to keep in mind is that there are a large number of talkers,
people who spend their time flaming but very little of their time writing
useful code. Those people seem to have the most time to argue about
licenses. There are other people who spend their time writing code,
useful code. The goal is to help the second, smaller, group.

BitKeeper seems to make that second group more productive. And it happily
allows for the license haters to keep on working the way they used to,
at the same speed as they used to. Daniel raised the point that BK has
created the "ins" and the "outs". That's not quite right, it's a question
of "efficient" versus "not quite so efficient". Yeah, it has the effect
of creating an "in" group, but that is because it is easier to work that
way, not because of any evil plan to take over the world with BK.

To repeat: if http://www.bitkeeper.com/kernel-howto.html or something
like that makes you happier, I'll do that immediately.
--
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Larry McVoy lm at bitmover.com http://www.bitmover.com/lm