Re: openbkweb-0.0

Larry McVoy
2003-02-15T05:22:34Z

On Sat, Feb 15, 2003 at 07:00:36AM +0200, Aggelos Economopoulos wrote:
> On Saturday 15 February 2003 05:11, Jamie Lokier wrote:
> [...]
> > [ Note that I won't agree to refrain from reverse engineering the
> > network protocol, as the price of using BK for free.
> >
> > Chances are I'll never bother, but it's not something I'd willingly
> > agree to not do, because I prefer to be not allowed to use BK than to
> > be effectively bound by an eternal NDA. ]
>
> What makes you think the licence is something like an _eternal_ NDA?
>
> Larry, I've used bitkeeper for a few months to pull linus's and rik's trees
> and export them for my own use until about a month ago. I've also tried
> using it in a single user repository for contest (the benchmark).
>
> Last week, feeling tempted to dig into arch, I removed all the files from
> the bitkeeper installation and I did a search-and-unlink of BitKeeper
> directories, just in case.
>
> Do you intend to sue me if I ever submit a patch for cvs/subversion/whatever
> (arch kind of sucks:-) or if I feel like starting my own scm project? (while
> I think this would be ridiculous I'm not trying to bash you here, it's an
> honest question regarding Jamie's comment above)

Nobody wins in a lawsuit, at least not at this level. I don't want to sue
you, that's nuts.

If you continued use BK and were working on an SCM system, yeah, we'd kick
up a fuss. Our position is that it was really hard to produce a system
which doesn't suck and it is a lot easier to copy such a system than it is
to invent one on your own. So we'd prefer you to figure it out on your
own than copy what we have done.
--
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Larry McVoy lm at bitmover.com http://www.bitmover.com/lm