Re: [RFC] Linux Kernel Subversion Howto

Stelian Pop
2005-02-08T15:23:22Z

On Tue, Feb 08, 2005 at 03:57:14PM +0100, Roman Zippel wrote:

> On Sun, 6 Feb 2005, Larry McVoy wrote:
>
> > [Larry continues to pull numbers out of his arse.]
>
> Out of sympathy to Al I cut the crap short. If you (or anyone else) really
> want to know, contact me privately.
> The 85% number is of secondary interest only anyway, my (undisputed)
> argumentation still stands, why the 44% is more important.

Indeed. This number is what started the entire thread (again).

> > > Well, I'm not the one who claimed "We don't do lockins. Period."
> > > I'm just trying to figure out what that means...
> >
> > Hey, Roman, the statement above stands. You made the choice that you want
> > to go write a competing system. If you hadn't you could just use BK and
> > stop whining. Since you have made that choice, which is your right,
> > how about you produce your competing system? And stop whining that
> > we aren't giving you enough help. What is that you say? It's hard?
[...]

> This leaves the other users, which either can't or want to use bk, with
> a reduced kernel history (as I have shown in the previous mails). The
> practical consequence of this is that a majority of the kernel history is
> locked into bk right now, with no way in sight to get it out of there.

Sadly, the BK license does not prohibit only 'writing competing systems',
but also people who happen to work with people who work on such
products.

Since Red Hat, SuSE, IBM etc do a lot of work on such products, does
this mean that all the kernel hackers working for those companies have
a commercial BK license ?

A second point which strikes me is this clause in the new license:
(g) No reverse engineering: You may not yourself and may not
permit or enable anyone to: [...]
(iii) provide access to
the metadata created and managed by BitKeeper to any person
or entity which is not licensed to use the BitKeeper Soft-
ware.

Tell me now how it is possible under this license to post patches
generated by BK on lkml ?

Stelian.
--
Stelian Pop <stelian@popies.net>