Re: BK is *evil* corporate software [was Re: New BK License Problem?]

Re: BK is *evil* corporate software [was Re: New BK License Problem?]

[Dan Kegel]

Larry McVoy <lm@bitmover.com> wrote:
> if you have 3-5 developers there is no reason to not use CVS,
> it works well enough.  ...
> OK, now let's look at it as you grow.  Most of our customers are in the 
> 25-100 developer range.  They move very quickly and have lots of parallelism
> in the code.  So things like work flow and merging are critical, if that
> doesn't work, the whole team slows down.  Let's say we have a 60 seat sale.
> That's $90K/year for BK.  Let's say the engineers cost $100K/each (it
> may be lower where you are but it's more like $180-220 here when you add
> in building/mgmt/all the other overhead).  So that's $6M/year in engineers.
> The BK cost is 1.5% of that.  You say that your guys are $50K/year?  OK,
> so we're at 3% of that.  The point is that if BK makes your team 3% more
> productive, it costs zero.
> 
> And none of that includes the hardware costs, which are dramatically
> cheaper for BK, it works on a laptop.  Clearcase doesn't.

Larry is spot on.  I evaluated Clearcase, Bitkeeper, and Perforce
recently
for an 80 developer shop currently suffering with SourceSafe.
Clearcase was ridiculously expensive and complex; I would never use it.  
Bitkeeper appeared to have *exactly* the features we wanted,
and the price was not out of our range.  We eventually settled on trying
Perforce for a while because we know it could do most of what we needed,
but it was a really tough call.  Larry took the time to make sure we
understood the issues, and I have a lot of respect for him.

Anyone who says Larry is evil is smoking crack.  He's good people.
- Dan

New BK License Problem?

[tom_gall]

Greetings all,

I noticed Larry recently changed the license on bk.  Once clause in 
particular struck me and I thought I'd better point it out for your 
reactions...

Specifically from Section 3:

        (d)  Notwithstanding any other terms in this License, this
             License is not available to You if  You  and/or  your
             employer  develop,  produce,  sell,  and/or  resell a
             product which contains substantially similar capabil-
             ities  of  the BitKeeper Software, or, in the reason-
             able opinion of BitMover, competes with the BitKeeper
             Software.

Doesn't this affect maintainers all across the map that work for 
distros such as RedHat, SuSE, Connectiva, etc?  Obviously these distros 
SELL as part of their respective products CVS and similar tools. Or 
even non-distro open source shops, you even resell CVS or the like in 
some way and you'd be in trouble.

While I am all for Larry having a profitable business, this would seem 
to be a change which is not Open Source developer friendly.

Regards,

Tom

Re: New BK License Problem?

[Larry McVoy]

> I noticed Larry recently changed the license on bk.  Once clause in 

This isn't a recent change at all, I know it is at least 6 months old
because it was included in 

BitKeeper version is bk-2.1.6-pre5 20020330075529 for x86-glibc22-linux
Built by: lm@redhat71.bitmover.com in /build/bk-2.1.x-lm/src
Built on: Sat Mar 30 00:14:45 PST 2002

>         (d)  Notwithstanding any other terms in this License, this
>              License is not available to You if  You  and/or  your
>              employer  develop,  produce,  sell,  and/or  resell a
>              product which contains substantially similar capabil-
>              ities  of  the BitKeeper Software, or, in the reason-
>              able opinion of BitMover, competes with the BitKeeper
>              Software.
> 
> Doesn't this affect maintainers all across the map that work for 
> distros such as RedHat, SuSE, Connectiva, etc?  Obviously these distros 
> SELL as part of their respective products CVS and similar tools. Or 
> even non-distro open source shops, you even resell CVS or the like in 
> some way and you'd be in trouble.

Distributions do not *SELL* CVS, they distribute CVS.  We choose those
words with care for exactly that reason.  All the clause is saying is
that if you are a competitor you don't get to use our product for free.
That it, in our opinion, a perfectly reasonable position to take.

> While I am all for Larry having a profitable business, this would seem 
> to be a change which is not Open Source developer friendly.

The clause is specifically designed to target those companies which 
produce or sell commercial SCM systems.  That's why we explicitly 
left out "distribute".  The open source developers have nothing to
worry about.
-- 
---
Larry McVoy            	 lm at bitmover.com           http://www.bitmover.com/lm 

Re: New BK License Problem?

[Ben Collins]

> >         (d)  Notwithstanding any other terms in this License, this
> >              License is not available to You if  You  and/or  your
> >              employer  develop,  produce,  sell,  and/or  resell a
> >              product which contains substantially similar capabil-
> >              ities  of  the BitKeeper Software, or, in the reason-
> >              able opinion of BitMover, competes with the BitKeeper
> >              Software.
> > 
> > Doesn't this affect maintainers all across the map that work for 
> > distros such as RedHat, SuSE, Connectiva, etc?  Obviously these distros 
> > SELL as part of their respective products CVS and similar tools. Or 
> > even non-distro open source shops, you even resell CVS or the like in 
> > some way and you'd be in trouble.
> 
> Distributions do not *SELL* CVS, they distribute CVS.  We choose those
> words with care for exactly that reason.  All the clause is saying is
> that if you are a competitor you don't get to use our product for free.
> That it, in our opinion, a perfectly reasonable position to take.

Larry, I develop for the Subversion project. Does that mean my license
to use bitkeeper is revoked?

I've also been wanting to use bitkeeper to create a Subversion mirror of
the kernel repository, but I suspect that my usage falls seriously into
this category, as my reasons for doing so are three-fold; allow access
to the bkbits repo to folks who don't want to use bk, but with all the
joys of an SCM (history, changesets, etc.); stress test Subversion
against a real-world high-activity repo; promote Subversion.

Would it be your intention that your license disallow my type of work? I
think it does.



Ben

-- 
Debian     - http://www.debian.org/
Linux 1394 - http://www.linux1394.org/
Subversion - http://subversion.tigris.org/
Deqo       - http://www.deqo.com/

Re: New BK License Problem?

[Larry McVoy]

On Sat, Oct 05, 2002 at 01:54:37PM -0400, Ben Collins wrote:
> Larry, I develop for the Subversion project. Does that mean my license
> to use bitkeeper is revoked?

Yes.  It has been since we shipped that license or when you started working
on Subversion, whichever came last.

> I've also been wanting to use bitkeeper to create a Subversion mirror of
> the kernel repository, but I suspect that my usage falls seriously into
> this category, as my reasons for doing so are three-fold; allow access
> to the bkbits repo to folks who don't want to use bk, but with all the
> joys of an SCM (history, changesets, etc.); stress test Subversion
> against a real-world high-activity repo; promote Subversion.
> 
> Would it be your intention that your license disallow my type of work? I
> think it does.

You bet it does.  The Subversion folks would like nothing better than
to displace BK.  That's fine, but they don't get to use BK to do it.
You're absolutely correct that you could use BK to make Subversion better.
It is not our job to help you make Subversion better and we've made that
clear for a long time.

We're a business.  We're a business which happens to be committed to
helping the kernel team because we think that the kernel is vital to
the world at large.  Helping the kernel absolutely does not translate
to helping people who happen to be our competitors.  By your own 
description and by our experience with you, you would be a competitor.

And since we're here, I'll take this opportunity to remind you that when I
asked about getting a netwinder so I could support the ARM folks, you were
the guy who sent me mail saying you had some that you weren't using and
that we couldn't have one because you didn't like our license.  If I recall
it was either that mail exchange or a subsequent one in which you made it
clear that you were working on Subversion so Subversion could replace BK.

You're the guy that refused to help us help the community.  And you made
it clear that you'd be delighted if Subversion was made good enough to
replace BK and you were working towards that goal.  I can't imagine a
better example of someone who we absolutely do not want to support and
do not want using BK.  I am explicitly stating that it is our view that
your use of BK is violation of our license.
-- 
---
Larry McVoy            	 lm at bitmover.com           http://www.bitmover.com/lm 

BK is *evil* corporate software [was Re: New BK License Problem?]

[Pavel Machek]

Hi!

> We're a business.  We're a business which happens to be committed to
> helping the kernel team because we think that the kernel is vital to
> the world at large.  Helping the kernel absolutely does not translate
> to helping people who happen to be our competitors.  By your own 

Stop lying. Your job is to make lots of money and you are using Linux
as cheap advertising. You are trying to make people pay *you* to do
kernel development (as it stands you want $5000 for any bk-using
developer inside RedHat and SuSE).

I hope your company dies ASAP and bitkeeper stops poisoning air here.

								Pavel
-- 
When do you have heart between your knees?

Re: BK is *evil* corporate software [was Re: New BK License Problem?]

[Mike Galbraith]

At 12:11 AM 10/7/2002 +0200, Pavel Machek wrote:
>Hi!
>
> > We're a business.  We're a business which happens to be committed to
> > helping the kernel team because we think that the kernel is vital to
> > the world at large.  Helping the kernel absolutely does not translate
> > to helping people who happen to be our competitors.  By your own
>
>Stop lying. Your job is to make lots of money and you are using Linux
>as cheap advertising. You are trying to make people pay *you* to do
>kernel development (as it stands you want $5000 for any bk-using
>developer inside RedHat and SuSE).

More info on $5k assertion please?

         -Mike

Re: BK is *evil* corporate software [was Re: New BK License Problem?]

[Larry McVoy]

On Mon, Oct 07, 2002 at 08:51:16PM +0200, Mike Galbraith wrote:
> At 12:11 AM 10/7/2002 +0200, Pavel Machek wrote:
> >Hi!
> >
> > > We're a business.  We're a business which happens to be committed to
> > > helping the kernel team because we think that the kernel is vital to
> > > the world at large.  Helping the kernel absolutely does not translate
> > > to helping people who happen to be our competitors.  By your own
> >
> >Stop lying. Your job is to make lots of money and you are using Linux
> >as cheap advertising. You are trying to make people pay *you* to do
> >kernel development (as it stands you want $5000 for any bk-using
> >developer inside RedHat and SuSE).
> 
> More info on $5k assertion please?

Let's clear this one up right away.  The commercial licenses can be
perpetual (you bought it, you own that version forever) or annual lease.
The lease includes the right to use, support, and upgrades for as long as
you maintain the lease.  The buy includes a year of support & upgrades;
after that you can buy support or not as you so choose.  So you have the
buy vs buy+support vs lease options.

We vary our prices based on volume and everyone gets the same price.
We don't publish the prices because engineers will reject the product
based on any price more than $100/seat.  Management is far more
reasonable, they want to know how much they spend and how much it
saves them, and are pretty unconcerned with what an engineer thinks.
They just want to see bottom line return on investment.

Because our support costs are higher per seat at low volumes, the product
is priced accordingly.  We really hate to sell less than lots of 15 seats
or so, it's not cost effective.  When we come across those situations
we try and steer them towards CVS (can't beat the price), single user
(also free), or we may give them an extended eval license and tell them
to come back when they are bigger.  At our end, the cost of rolling out
a new commercial customer is about $10 - $15K in salaries.  Part of that
is normal support, part of that is that we almost always sweeten a sale
by letting the customer say "I'm not going to buy unless it does XYZ"
provided that XYZ is something we think is generically useful.  So the
sale gets to shuffle our priorities a bit and that ends up costing
us extra money.  It's all good, it just means that if a sale is less than
$15K we probably don't want it.  We love the level of support we give,
it's a huge part of why our users love BK, so we price where we have to
price.  We're not a low end, low service shop, quite the opposite.

The annual lease prices vary from $1K/seat for lots of seats to
$2.4K/seat for one seat (nobody leases or buys one seat, they use it in
single user mode).  The buy prices range from $2800/seat to $5800/seat.
The buy vs lease trade off is such that it is between 4 and 6 years before
it becomes cheaper to have bought than to have leased so everyone leases.
A seat is defined as a person who makes changes and floats automatically
every three months (to handle employee turnover, that sort of thing).

Noone has ever given us $5K for a seat and I doubt very much that anyone
ever will.  Everyone leases and they lease at high enough volumes that 
the lease price is around $1.5K.  

A couple things are worth noting.  We compete mostly with <insert market
leader here, we'll call them BIG>.  Our lease prices, at high enough
volumes, are the same as or lower than BIG annual support prices.
BIG runs around $5K/seat plus 20% / year in support.  So we're quite
competitive on the licensing costs.  But it gets much, much better.
The BIG architecture is centralized so performance bottlenecks are
also centralized.  As you add users you have to add server hardware.
It's very common to spend $300K on a big Sun SMP box to keep up with
the load.  A $2K PC can do the same thing with BK, look at bkbits.net,
it's a 750Mhz Athlon, it has about 2000 different users.  The next cost
center is administration.  Again, the centralized architecture means
that you pay people a lot of money to make sure that the BIG server
never dies because everyone goes home if it does.

We had a customer who had a site license for BIG and they wanted a 4 site
multisite config.  They asked us to price it for BIG and for BK.  They
already had some of the hardware and some of the people they would need,
and they didn't have to pay for BIG, just support, so these numbers are 
lower than they should.  Doesn't matter.  The costs for them worked out
to about $218K to get started plus $144K/year to keep going.  The BK
costs worked out to $8K to get started and $52K/year to keep going. 
5 year cost of ownership: BIG: $938, BK: $268.    The customer looked 
at our math and said "Your BIG costs are way too low but it doesn't 
matter, you made your point" and they bought BK seats.  Who wouldn't
if the numbers work out like that and the product suits your needs?

So, to reiterate, we don't publish our prices because an engineer will
look at $2000 and say "bug off, I'm not paying that much for that".  They
don't think that $2K is 1-2% of what their management pays them in a 
year, they don't think about the hardware costs, they don't think about
the people costs, they just go "I wouldn't pay for that so forget that".
-- 
---
Larry McVoy            	 lm at bitmover.com           http://www.bitmover.com/lm 

Re: BK is *evil* corporate software [was Re: New BK License Problem?]

[Henning P. Schmiedehausen]

Larry McVoy <lm@bitmover.com> writes:

>On Mon, Oct 07, 2002 at 08:51:16PM +0200, Mike Galbraith wrote:
>> At 12:11 AM 10/7/2002 +0200, Pavel Machek wrote:
>> >Hi!
>> >
>> > > We're a business.  We're a business which happens to be committed to
>> > > helping the kernel team because we think that the kernel is vital to
>> > > the world at large.  Helping the kernel absolutely does not translate
>> > > to helping people who happen to be our competitors.  By your own
>> >
>> >Stop lying. Your job is to make lots of money and you are using Linux
>> >as cheap advertising. You are trying to make people pay *you* to do
>> >kernel development (as it stands you want $5000 for any bk-using
>> >developer inside RedHat and SuSE).
>> 
>> More info on $5k assertion please?

>Let's clear this one up right away.  The commercial licenses can be
>perpetual (you bought it, you own that version forever) or annual lease.
>The lease includes the right to use, support, and upgrades for as long as
>you maintain the lease.  The buy includes a year of support & upgrades;
>after that you can buy support or not as you so choose.  So you have the
>buy vs buy+support vs lease options.

>We vary our prices based on volume and everyone gets the same price.
>We don't publish the prices because engineers will reject the product
>based on any price more than $100/seat.  Management is far more

Let's insert some fact in this discussion:

--- cut ---
Annual lease:
< 5 seats, $2490/seat/year.
5-15 seats, $1920/seat/year.

Lifetime Purchase:
< 5 seats, $5220/seat.
5-15 seats, $4230/seat.
--- cut ---

Basically you charge a small(-ish) company about $25k for any
reasonable license. This is about as much as we spent for Software in
the last seven years (we do own a few Windows and Office licenses).

bk might be interesting for larger companies with software budgets in
the six figure range and for open source. For the vast number of three
to five developers enterprises, it's simply unreasonably priced. For
25k$ I get about six man months from a really good developer to work
on <insert your SCM here>.

	Regards
		Henning

-- 
Dipl.-Inf. (Univ.) Henning P. Schmiedehausen       -- Geschaeftsfuehrer
INTERMETA - Gesellschaft fuer Mehrwertdienste mbH     hps@intermeta.de

Am Schwabachgrund 22  Fon.: 09131 / 50654-0   info@intermeta.de
D-91054 Buckenhof     Fax.: 09131 / 50654-20   

Re: BK is *evil* corporate software [was Re: New BK License Problem?]

[Larry McVoy]

> Let's insert some fact in this discussion:

OK.

> Basically you charge a small(-ish) company about $25k for any
> reasonable license. This is about as much as we spent for Software in
> the last seven years (we do own a few Windows and Office licenses).
> 
> bk might be interesting for larger companies with software budgets in
> the six figure range and for open source. For the vast number of three
> to five developers enterprises, it's simply unreasonably priced. For
> 25k$ I get about six man months from a really good developer to work
> on <insert your SCM here>.

Sure.  And if you have 3-5 developers there is no reason to not use CVS,
it works well enough.  Or Subversion after it matures, or Arch, or Aegis,
or tarballs+diff+patch.  

We can't, and won't, compete at that level.  You're comparing free against
what we charge.  We're infinitely expensive in that comparison.

OK, now let's look at it as you grow.  Most of our customers are in the 
25-100 developer range.  They move very quickly and have lots of parallelism
in the code.  So things like work flow and merging are critical, if that
doesn't work, the whole team slows down.  Let's say we have a 60 seat sale.
That's $90K/year for BK.  Let's say the engineers cost $100K/each (it
may be lower where you are but it's more like $180-220 here when you add
in building/mgmt/all the other overhead).  So that's $6M/year in engineers.
The BK cost is 1.5% of that.  You say that your guys are $50K/year?  OK,
so we're at 3% of that.  The point is that if BK makes your team 3% more
productive, it costs zero.

And none of that includes the hardware costs, which are dramatically
cheaper for BK, it works on a laptop.  Clearcase doesn't.

Whatever, I know that BK doesn't make sense for a 3 man shop.  And I
know you think it is way too expensive.  Your opinion is not universally
shared because the costs start to make more and more sense as you get
larger.  I am sorry if you don't agree but that's the way it is.  You
are welcome to use Perforce or CVS instead, we encourage it in fact.
-- 
---
Larry McVoy            	 lm at bitmover.com           http://www.bitmover.com/lm 

Re: BK is *evil* corporate software [was Re: New BK License Problem?]

[Mark Mielke]

On Wed, Oct 09, 2002 at 04:55:00PM -0700, Larry McVoy wrote:
> And none of that includes the hardware costs, which are dramatically
> cheaper for BK, it works on a laptop.  Clearcase doesn't.

ClearCase does work on lap tops. Even if you mean disconnected,
ClearCase allows work to continue with snapshot views... :-)

Hardware costs are nothing really. The true killer with ClearCase is
the support costs. Not only do you need several full time people to
deal with user problems, you need several full time people to
customize your solution such that it meets your needs, several full
time people to baby the servers, and a whole management structure on
top to ensure that the full time people talk to each other, and the
actual users.

$3000/head really is nothing to large companies. CVS developers don't
understand, but for companies with several hundred designers, using
CVS would end up costing a heckuvalot more. I have become so
accustomed to features that are available in higher level systems such
as ClearCase that I find it difficult to use CVS. It is the difference
between black and white and colour.

mark

-- 
mark@mielke.cc/markm@ncf.ca/markm@nortelnetworks.com __________________________
.  .  _  ._  . .   .__    .  . ._. .__ .   . . .__  | Neighbourhood Coder
|\/| |_| |_| |/    |_     |\/|  |  |_  |   |/  |_   | 
|  | | | | \ | \   |__ .  |  | .|. |__ |__ | \ |__  | Ottawa, Ontario, Canada

  One ring to rule them all, one ring to find them, one ring to bring them all
                       and in the darkness bind them...

                           http://mark.mielke.cc/

Re: BK is *evil* corporate software [was Re: New BK License Problem?]

[Derek D. Martin]

[-- Attachment #1: msg.pgp --]
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At some point hitherto, Mark Mielke hath spake thusly:
> Hardware costs are nothing really. The true killer with ClearCase is
> the support costs. Not only do you need several full time people to
> deal with user problems, you need several full time people to
> customize your solution such that it meets your needs, several full
> time people to baby the servers, and a whole management structure on
> top to ensure that the full time people talk to each other, and the
> actual users.

I'd have to disagree... though it probably depends on your environment
a great deal, and possibly how braindead your development team and/or
your sysadmin team is.  At a previous job, I was one of two system
administrators that supported ClearCase in our Solaris environment for
about 100 engineers.  That is, there were two of us, and I never
touched it.  My coworker spent maybe an hour a week on it, discounting
time spent migrating to new hardware and a new config when our
environment changed (drastically).  I think that, like most
applications that aren't inherently broken, once you have it set up
PROPERLY for your environment, it doesn't require much maintenance.
Nor should it.  OTOH like I said, I didn't touch it, so for all I know
it could have been a horrid mess that the developers just weren't
inclined to complain about.  But I tend to doubt that...

Oh, and we never really saw our manager much... ;-)  Actually most of
the time, the engineers appreciated that.  For the most part, when
they had problems, they just came to us directly, and we took care of
them.  The only time management got involved was when each of our
visions of how things were supposed to work were miles apart, and we
each felt strongly about our own vision.  It was, in many ways, an
ideal job.  Unfortunately, as in most cases, circumstances change...

I have no comment about whether or not BK is evil...  ;-)

- -- 
Derek D. Martin
http://www.pizzashack.org/
GPG Key ID: 0x81CFE75D

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Re: BK is *evil* corporate software [was Re: New BK License Problem?]

[Mark Mielke]

On Thu, Oct 10, 2002 at 12:16:48AM -0400, Derek D. Martin wrote:
> At some point hitherto, Mark Mielke hath spake thusly:
> > Hardware costs are nothing really. The true killer with ClearCase is
> > the support costs. Not only do you need several full time people to
> > deal with user problems, you need several full time people to
> > customize your solution such that it meets your needs, several full
> > time people to baby the servers, and a whole management structure on
> > top to ensure that the full time people talk to each other, and the
> > actual users.
> I'd have to disagree... though it probably depends on your environment
> a great deal, and possibly how braindead your development team and/or
> your sysadmin team is.  At a previous job, I was one of two system
> administrators that supported ClearCase in our Solaris environment for
> about 100 engineers.  That is, there were two of us, and I never
> ...

I may be talking about a company with 5000+ designers using ClearCase
with many sites around the world... :-)

mark

-- 
mark@mielke.cc/markm@ncf.ca/markm@nortelnetworks.com __________________________
.  .  _  ._  . .   .__    .  . ._. .__ .   . . .__  | Neighbourhood Coder
|\/| |_| |_| |/    |_     |\/|  |  |_  |   |/  |_   | 
|  | | | | \ | \   |__ .  |  | .|. |__ |__ | \ |__  | Ottawa, Ontario, Canada

  One ring to rule them all, one ring to find them, one ring to bring them all
                       and in the darkness bind them...

                           http://mark.mielke.cc/

Re: BK is *evil* corporate software [was Re: New BK License Problem?]

[Jirka David]

Hi all.
I'm currently working like a ClearCase admin and configuration manager in a
world-wide company. And I can say the CC (ClearCase) is unbelievable
expensive. In my country 1 developer  on-site license costs about $6500. And
another $6500 for multi-site license to share the same source code between
two or more sites or countries. You have to have both of them to access
multi-sited source database. It means $13000 !!!! for single developer.

> > At a previous job, I was one of two system
> > administrators that supported ClearCase in our Solaris environment for
> > about 100 engineers.  That is, there were two of us, and I never

I am one of two administrators too. Configuration of the fully automated
multi-sited with synchronisation of replicas system took us about 6 moths.
But now a year after it works fine and without significant troubles.

> I may be talking about a company with 5000+ designers using ClearCase
> with many sites around the world... :-)

So this is my point of wiew from CC admin of CC network with cca 1000
developers. CC is milk cow for Rational and is totaly unusable for the linux
kernel developers. In this time I know nothing about BK, but who knows the
future ... :o)

Jiri

Re: BK is *evil* corporate software [was Re: New BK License Problem?]

[Rogier Wolff]

On Wed, Oct 09, 2002 at 04:55:00PM -0700, Larry McVoy wrote:
> Sure.  And if you have 3-5 developers there is no reason to not use CVS,
> it works well enough.  Or Subversion after it matures, or Arch, or Aegis,
> or tarballs+diff+patch.  
> 
> We can't, and won't, compete at that level.  You're comparing free against
> what we charge.  We're infinitely expensive in that comparison.

> [at 25-100 developers, BK makes sense]...

Larry, 

Why do you "give away" BK for single-user use? That's to make 
people familiar with the product so that they will know about it 
when they DO need it in the case that they end up in a situation 
where it does make sense. right?

Now you're saying that you don't want the market of 2-10 developers:
the other version control systems don't hurt enough. 

Would it make sense to allow these people to use BK for free under
these circumstances, so that WHEN they grow, they are already
using BK, and know exactly how to use it?

My company with 2 developers will survive on tar&diff if you want 
money for BK from us. We might decide that "tar&diff" still works
when we cross the 25 developer line..... You might want us to be 
using BK by that time.

			Roger. 

-- 
** R.E.Wolff@BitWizard.nl ** http://www.BitWizard.nl/ ** +31-15-2600998 **
*-- BitWizard writes Linux device drivers for any device you may have! --*
* The Worlds Ecosystem is a stable system. Stable systems may experience *
* excursions from the stable situation. We are currenly in such an       * 
* excursion: The stable situation does not include humans. ***************

Re: BK is *evil* corporate software [was Re: New BK License Problem?]

[Larry McVoy]

> Now you're saying that you don't want the market of 2-10 developers:
> the other version control systems don't hurt enough. 
> 
> Would it make sense to allow these people to use BK for free under
> these circumstances, so that WHEN they grow, they are already
> using BK, and know exactly how to use it?

If and only if letting them do so is zero cost to us.  Otherwise what you
are asking is that we spend money and not take in money.  Doesn't make 
sense.  And I don't think the BK docs are good enough that it would cost
us zero dollars to roll out a new customer.

> My company with 2 developers will survive on tar&diff if you want 
> money for BK from us. We might decide that "tar&diff" still works
> when we cross the 25 developer line..... You might want us to be 
> using BK by that time.

When you cross the 25 developer line, if tar+diff are working for you
then there is no price where BK makes sense for you.
-- 
---
Larry McVoy            	 lm at bitmover.com           http://www.bitmover.com/lm 

Re: BK is *evil* corporate software [was Re: New BK License Problem?]

[yodaiken]

On Wed, Oct 09, 2002 at 04:55:00PM -0700, Larry McVoy wrote:
> > Let's insert some fact in this discussion:
> 
> OK.
> 
> > Basically you charge a small(-ish) company about $25k for any
> > reasonable license. This is about as much as we spent for Software in
> > the last seven years (we do own a few Windows and Office licenses).

The historical expense for software
in your company has absolutely no relation to the cost-effectiveness of
a new purchase as far as I can see.

But it is interesting that you can hire a full time "really good" 
programmer for total cost of $50K/year. Salaries are dropping.




-- 
---------------------------------------------------------
Victor Yodaiken 
Finite State Machine Labs: The RTLinux Company.
 www.fsmlabs.com  www.rtlinux.com

Re: BK is *evil* corporate software [was Re: New BK License Problem?]

[Henning P. Schmiedehausen]

yodaiken@fsmlabs.com writes:

>But it is interesting that you can hire a full time "really good" 
>programmer for total cost of $50K/year. Salaries are dropping.

For small and medium companies (such as Siemens...), $50k (or the
rough aequivalent of EUR 50k) are already good developers salary.

The time of the "I can do Visual Basic and start at EUR 70k/year and
expect 5% raise every year" developers are gone. Thank goodness for
that.

	Regards
		Henning

-- 
Dipl.-Inf. (Univ.) Henning P. Schmiedehausen       -- Geschaeftsfuehrer
INTERMETA - Gesellschaft fuer Mehrwertdienste mbH     hps@intermeta.de

Am Schwabachgrund 22  Fon.: 09131 / 50654-0   info@intermeta.de
D-91054 Buckenhof     Fax.: 09131 / 50654-20   

Re: BK is *evil* corporate software [was Re: New BK License Problem?]

[Jeff Garzik]

Henning P. Schmiedehausen wrote:
> yodaiken@fsmlabs.com writes:
> 
> 
>>But it is interesting that you can hire a full time "really good" 
>>programmer for total cost of $50K/year. Salaries are dropping.
> 
> 
> For small and medium companies (such as Siemens...), $50k (or the
> rough aequivalent of EUR 50k) are already good developers salary.


You consider Siemens a medium company?  ;-)  They're friggin huge...  42 
companies under their umbrella when I worked for them 10 years ago... 
Siemens AG was one of the world's largest conglomerates...

	Jeff

Re: BK is *evil* corporate software [was Re: New BK License Problem?]

[Richard B. Johnson]

On Thu, 10 Oct 2002, Jeff Garzik wrote:

> Henning P. Schmiedehausen wrote:
> > yodaiken@fsmlabs.com writes:
> > 
> > 
> >>But it is interesting that you can hire a full time "really good" 
> >>programmer for total cost of $50K/year. Salaries are dropping.
> > 
> > 
> > For small and medium companies (such as Siemens...), $50k (or the
> > rough aequivalent of EUR 50k) are already good developers salary.
> 
> 
> You consider Siemens a medium company?  ;-)  They're friggin huge...  42 
> companies under their umbrella when I worked for them 10 years ago... 
> Siemens AG was one of the world's largest conglomerates...
> 
> 	Jeff
>
 
...and they own and control more of the world than anything else,
including the world's major armies, ever has during recorded history.
If they were to abuse their power, Siemens could control the ultimate
destiny of mankind. Scarey!

Cheers,
Dick Johnson
Penguin : Linux version 2.4.18 on an i686 machine (797.90 BogoMips).
The US military has given us many words, FUBAR, SNAFU, now ENRON.
Yes, top management were graduates of West Point and Annapolis.

Re: BK is *evil* corporate software [was Re: New BK License Problem?]

[Alan Cox]

On Thu, 2002-10-10 at 17:52, Richard B. Johnson wrote:
> ...and they own and control more of the world than anything else,
> including the world's major armies, ever has during recorded history.
> If they were to abuse their power, Siemens could control the ultimate
> destiny of mankind. Scarey!

Siemens to take over redmond using transferrable power from the
barvarian illuminat..

Oh wait wrong mailing list

Can well kill the BK thread now please ?

Re: BK is *evil* corporate software [was Re: New BK License Problem?]

[Larry McVoy]

On Thu, Oct 10, 2002 at 04:14:03PM +0000, Henning P. Schmiedehausen wrote:
> yodaiken@fsmlabs.com writes:
> 
> >But it is interesting that you can hire a full time "really good" 
> >programmer for total cost of $50K/year. Salaries are dropping.
> 
> For small and medium companies (such as Siemens...), $50k (or the
> rough aequivalent of EUR 50k) are already good developers salary.

But that $50K is not the whole story.  That's *unburdened*, it doesn't
include any of the associated costs such as benefits, taxes, office space,
expenses, etc.  When I was at SGI I was making around $130K and I was
pretty high up in the salary curve.  At the time, their *average* burdened
cost was $180K/engineer/year.  There is no way that $130K was the average
engineer salary, it was quite a bit lower than that, my guess would be
around 90 or 100.  

You're looking at all this from the typical engineer perspective.
That's not a reasonable perspective at a company of any size.  Management
cares how much the tools cost if they make the engineers significantly
more productive.  The human costs dwarf the tools cost.  So the real
question is how much more do you get out of a team who is using BK than
you would get out of a team who is using CVS or whatever.  If the answer
isn't at least the cost of BK then BK is obviously the wrong choice.
My personal feeling is that the absolute lowest point that would make
sense is a 2x difference.  The reality is that for a company of any
size, it's way bigger than that.  If it wasn't, we'd have no customers.
Times are tough.  People aren't giving us money because they like us, they
do it because the tool gives value in excess of the costs.  One customer,
when asked if we could tell people about their use of BK, refused to let
us because they believe that BK was a competitive advantage, it helped
them get to market faster than anyone else.

Everyone has to decide for themselves what make sense.  I tend to agree
that paying for BK for a small number of seats doesn't make sense,
with a small number of people you can get by easily with CVS or one of
the other free tools.  Eventually that will cause you problems and once
those problems are costing you money, then you may see that spending
that money on BK is actually a net reduction of cost.
-- 
---
Larry McVoy            	 lm at bitmover.com           http://www.bitmover.com/lm 

Re: BK is *evil* corporate software [was Re: New BK License Problem?]

[Eli Carter]

Larry McVoy wrote:
[snip]
> Everyone has to decide for themselves what make sense.  I tend to agree
> that paying for BK for a small number of seats doesn't make sense,
> with a small number of people you can get by easily with CVS or one of
> the other free tools.  Eventually that will cause you problems and once
> those problems are costing you money, then you may see that spending
> that money on BK is actually a net reduction of cost.

Ok, honest question for you Larry:

Assume for the moment that I'm not eligible for the free BK license (I 
don't think that's the case, but for the question...).
Assume that I plan a project that is going to start at 1 person and grow.
Assume that at some point in the future, that project will grow large 
and complex enough to need BK.

What source control should I use _now_ so that I can grow into BK over 
time?  Bonus question: Why?
(The answer may be something like  'CVS -> Subversion -> ... -> BK', but 
I don't know.)

A little bit of background:  In college I didn't know of source control. 
  CVS was a godsend for me when I found it.  But renames, copies, 
directories, dealing with multiple files in a change, those kinds of 
things "hurt" in CVS, even with just me.  I want better tools, ideally 
open-source, but I suspect that I don't know what I'm looking for.

TIA,

Eli
--------------------. "If it ain't broke now,
Eli Carter           \                  it will be soon." -- crypto-gram
eli.carter(a)inet.com `-------------------------------------------------

Re: BK is *evil* corporate software [was Re: New BK License Problem?]

[Larry McVoy]

> What source control should I use _now_ so that I can grow into BK over 
> time?  Bonus question: Why?

CVS.  It's the most widely used system in the world, it has problems but you
can work around those problems, the FreeBSD guys are all in CVS and so is
Mozilla.  

When the day comes that you want to move out, we can import your history
perfectly, you can't see the boundary where CVS stopped and BK started.
-- 
---
Larry McVoy            	 lm at bitmover.com           http://www.bitmover.com/lm 

Re: BK is *evil* corporate software [was Re: New BK License Problem?]

[Jamie Lokier]

Henning P. Schmiedehausen wrote:
> bk might be interesting for larger companies with software budgets in
> the six figure range and for open source. For the vast number of three
> to five developers enterprises, it's simply unreasonably priced. For
> 25k$ I get about six man months from a really good developer to work
> on <insert your SCM here>.

Larry's point is that six man months won't get you anywhere near as
good as BK.  I'm not sure how much effort Larry and his team put in,
but a hand waving guess puts it at 200 or so man months (5 years times
3 developers, I am just guessing), minus the overhead of running a
business (need to hunt for sales, follow the market etc.) which you
wouldn't have.  Let's call that 80% overhead, another hand waving
guesstimate from my experience with working in a company.

Assuming you miraculously would have no developer overhead, not even
the cost of office space, admin, accountants etc. for employing
someone, then at your really good developer rates, the correct price
is 166k$ :-)

For a small enterprise both prices are unreasonable.  Which is
precisely why you cannot afford to develop something like BK yourself
from scratch -- and unfortunately you can't afford to buy it either.

Oh you can probably _clone_ BK in 6 months though; programming's much
less work than developing the concepts behind the program.  Good luck,
btw I'd appreciate if you GPL it, thanks :)

-- Jamie


ps. From my limited experience, the hard part in writing a program
like BK isn't quantifiable in $$.  One talented and motivated
programmer probably _could_ develop BK in 6 months given all the right
environment, input, skills, motivations and history.  But their salary
is the smallest part of that.  How likely are you to _find_ a person
who's specifically interested and skilled in developing high quality
SCM systems, and who's been refining the ideas for the last 10 years?
If it's the right person, you probably don't even need to pay them,
just keep them fed and housed for the time it takes :-)

Re: BK is *evil* corporate software [was Re: New BK License Problem?]

[Rogier Wolff]

On Thu, Oct 10, 2002 at 01:03:55AM +0100, Jamie Lokier wrote:
> ps. From my limited experience, the hard part in writing a program
> like BK isn't quantifiable in $$.  One talented and motivated
> programmer probably _could_ develop BK in 6 months given all the right
> environment, input, skills, motivations and history.  But their salary
> is the smallest part of that.  How likely are you to _find_ a person
> who's specifically interested and skilled in developing high quality
> SCM systems, and who's been refining the ideas for the last 10 years?

Ehmmm. I think your're talking about BitMover. The talented guy with the
vision is called Larry, and he's still using over 200 man-months to 
develop the b*tch...

				Roger.

-- 
** R.E.Wolff@BitWizard.nl ** http://www.BitWizard.nl/ ** +31-15-2600998 **
*-- BitWizard writes Linux device drivers for any device you may have! --*
* The Worlds Ecosystem is a stable system. Stable systems may experience *
* excursions from the stable situation. We are currenly in such an       * 
* excursion: The stable situation does not include humans. ***************

Re: BK is *evil* corporate software [was Re: New BK License Problem?]

[tom_gall]

On Sunday, October 6, 2002, at 05:11 PM, Pavel Machek wrote:

> Hi!
>
>> We're a business.  We're a business which happens to be committed to
>> helping the kernel team because we think that the kernel is vital to
>> the world at large.  Helping the kernel absolutely does not translate
>> to helping people who happen to be our competitors.  By your own
>
> Stop lying. Your job is to make lots of money and you are using Linux
> as cheap advertising. You are trying to make people pay *you* to do
> kernel development (as it stands you want $5000 for any bk-using
> developer inside RedHat and SuSE).

O Please!  As the person that started this thread this is way way way 
way out there and quite frankly I find offensive.

I do NOT honestly think that Larry made the change to the license that 
he did for the express purpose of milking some set of companies out of 
$$$$.  That's just dumb.

Like Larry and others who have made some rather good points over the 
couple of days, I think we're all trying to find a way to reasonably 
solve this that is is everyone's best interesting, including Larry's 
company.

Granted it's a different kind of license, (IE Microsoft doesn't have a 
clause in IE that says Netscape developers can't use IE) but hey, it's 
Larry's company and he's perfectly in his rights to do so.  It is 
truely a good thing that Larry is allowing some set of us in the open 
source community to use his product without costs. Personally I'm 
willing to pay a reasonable license fee for it but it's gotta be 
something that I can afford without getting my head torn off by my 
wife. Of course the other solution is to adjust the license a bit so 
folks like me who are just doing kernel work and not in competition 
with Larry's company (no matter what others in my company are doing) 
can use it.

That's what I hope for...   maybe it'll come true.

Regards,

Tom

Re: BK is *evil* corporate software [was Re: New BK License Problem?]

[Pavel Machek]

Hi!

> >>We're a business.  We're a business which happens to be committed to
> >>helping the kernel team because we think that the kernel is vital to
> >>the world at large.  Helping the kernel absolutely does not translate
> >>to helping people who happen to be our competitors.  By your own
> >
> >Stop lying. Your job is to make lots of money and you are using Linux
> >as cheap advertising. You are trying to make people pay *you* to do
> >kernel development (as it stands you want $5000 for any bk-using
> >developer inside RedHat and SuSE).
> 
> O Please!  As the person that started this thread this is way way way 
> way out there and quite frankly I find offensive.
> 
> I do NOT honestly think that Larry made the change to the license that 
> he did for the express purpose of milking some set of companies out of 
> $$$$.  That's just dumb.

Maybe it is doing for purpose of slowing down subversion/CVS/arch
development. Thats about as bad.

> Granted it's a different kind of license, (IE Microsoft doesn't have a 
> clause in IE that says Netscape developers can't use IE) but hey, it's 
> Larry's company and he's perfectly in his rights to do so.  It is 
> truely a good thing that Larry is allowing some set of us in the open 
> source community to use his product without costs. 

Good thing for who?

Good thing for Larry? I don't know.

Good thing for us? I don't think so.

Good thing for subversion developers? Definitely not.

								Pavel
-- 
Casualities in World Trade Center: ~3k dead inside the building,
cryptography in U.S.A. and free speech in Czech Republic.

Re: BK is *evil* corporate software [was Re: New BK License Problem?]

[Rik van Riel]

On Mon, 7 Oct 2002, Pavel Machek wrote:

> Maybe it is doing for purpose of slowing down subversion/CVS/arch
> development. Thats about as bad.

You sound about as pissed off as you do in a random thread about
somebody who violates the GPL, only now you're on the other side
of the fence.

If you don't like the new bitkeeper license, don't use bitkeeper.

If you feel _really_ strongly about it, help the subversion people
to build something as good as, or better than, bitkeeper so you
can convince kernel hackers to switch.

regards,

Rik
-- 
Bravely reimplemented by the knights who say "NIH".
http://www.surriel.com/		http://distro.conectiva.com/
Current spamtrap:  <a href=mailto:"october@surriel.com">october@surriel.com</a>

Re: BK is *evil* corporate software [was Re: New BK License Problem?]

[Alexander Viro]

On Mon, 7 Oct 2002, Pavel Machek wrote:

> Good thing for who?
> 
> Good thing for Larry? I don't know.
> 
> Good thing for us? I don't think so.
> 
> Good thing for subversion developers? Definitely not.

Damn you.  That thread got me to download subversion source and read it -
mistake I won't repeat any time soon.  I've spent several months wading
through fairly disgusting code - block device drivers are not pretty,
ditto for devfs.  I had more than once found myself grabbing Lovecraft
to read something that would be less nightmare-inducing.  But _THAT_ takes
the fscking cake - I don't _care_ what Larry (or anybody else for that
matter) does to people who had excreted that code.  No, wait - I _do_ care.
I want video of the... event.

I don't use BK, but you can be damn sure that I won't touch SVN.  Ever.

Re: BK is *evil* corporate software [was Re: New BK License Problem?]

[Rik van Riel]

On Mon, 7 Oct 2002, Pavel Machek wrote:

> Stop lying.

Look who's talking.  *plonk*

> (as it stands you want $5000 for any bk-using
> developer inside RedHat and SuSE).


Rik
-- 
Bravely reimplemented by the knights who say "NIH".
http://www.surriel.com/		http://distro.conectiva.com/
Current spamtrap:  <a href=mailto:"october@surriel.com">october@surriel.com</a>