Re: [RFC] Linux Kernel Subversion Howto

Larry McVoy
2005-02-10T21:17:11Z

Hi Alexandre,

It seems like you've made up your mind that we are operating out of pure
self interest and have no desire to help you or anyone else unless we
get something out of it. In other words, we're making our decisions
based on the net positive/negative effect on our business.

Is that a fair assessment of your position?

It's clear that the path we took has generated illwill amongst some of
you, the web is full of BK license is awful pages, etc. It's a matter
of the public record that we had at least some idea that this was going
to happen, we didn't expect that you'd all be happy with this arrangement.

So if we knew that doing this would hurt our business, which according
you is the only thing we care about, then why would we do it? The usual
response is the marketing value we get out of it. Yes, we certainly do
get some positive marketing out of this. We also get a ton of negative
marketing, you are aware of that, right?

Is it your opinion that the postive marketing we get outweighs the
negative? That's possible, I don't think it's true, but lets suppose it
is. That's only part of the picture. The other part is that we are
taking a huge risk by giving away the product to very group that is most
motivated to copy it, and if a good enough copy existed it is unlikely
our business would success.

If you are willing to believe that we have good good enough management
here that we were aware of this, and we added up the illwill and the IP
risk and did it anyway. Why? Why would any business do something that
was obviously a poor business decision? Please don't take the cheap
shot and say we are idiots, the founder of your company has advised us
from day one as have others. We knew what we were doing.

Can you offer any plausible explanation other than a good faith desire
to help the open source community, albeit in a non-traditional way?

This is perhaps a hard concept to grasp but we are basically saying we're
willing to help everyone except the people who want to take our business
away. I would guess that over 99.999% of the open source in the world
has nothing to do with SCM. That's a lot of source that we can help.
You are saying we are an evil money grubbing corporation because we
don't want to give our technology to our competitors. Fair enough,
that's true, we don't. What you aren't admitting is that we have done
a lot of good for your community, we continue to provide the tools,
the support, the infrastructure, and we do it in spite of it not being
a very good business decision. If we get no credit in your mind for
all of that then I don't think we have any basis for further discussion.
--
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Larry McVoy lm at bitmover.com http://www.bitkeeper.com