Re: [RFC] Linux Kernel Subversion Howto

Larry McVoy
2005-02-09T18:46:38Z

On Wed, Feb 09, 2005 at 12:17:48PM -0500, Nicolas Pitre wrote:
> On Tue, 8 Feb 2005, Larry McVoy wrote:
> > You know, you could change all this. Instead of complaining that we
> > are somehow hurting you, which virtually 100% of the readers know is
> > nonsense, you could be producing an alternative answer which is better.
>
> IMHO something is flawed in this whole argument. Why would someone be
> interested into any alternative answer for working on the Linux kernel
> tree if the whole thing can't be imported into it with the same
> granularity as can be found in BK? IOW what's the point to alternatives
> if you can't retrieve the entire workset?

Please explain to me where the data is being lost. 100% of the patches
are available on bkbits.net with no license agreement required. They
always have been.

The problem is that you want us to tell you how BK manages those patches.
That was never part of the agreement, in fact we made it clear in the
license that that information was considered to be IP and could not be
distributed. How BK does that is our business, not yours. If you want
to know how BK does it you must go figure it out without the benefit
of BK itself or metadata managed by BK.

While I understand that you don't like it, is there no sense of fairness
left? We did the hard work to create BK. Some of us worked for *years*
without pay to create this product. Some of us put our life savings
into the product. It's our IP, we paid heavily to create this, is it
so unreasonable of us to want to protect our work? I believe we are
within our legal rights, or so our legal team tells us, but that should
be beside the point. It's our work. We paid for it. We certainly
don't have any obligation to tell you how we did it and to us it seems
pretty unreasonable that you don't just go off and do the work yourself.
And pretty unadmirable as well, don't you have any faith in your own
abilities?
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Larry McVoy lm at bitmover.com http://www.bitkeeper.com