On Mon, Apr 22, 2002 at 01:37:19PM -0500, Jonathan A. George wrote:
> The BK documentation constitutes an implicit advertisement and
> endorsement of a product with a license which to many developers
> violates the spirit of open source software.
Agreed.
And the simple fact of Linus using BitKeeper does the
_exact_ _same_ _thing_.
Talk Linus out of using BitKeeper, and sure, I'll remove the doc.
> This is not to say that BK
> is not an effective product, nor that the document in question is useful
> for people who choose the tool, but to me it seems comparable to
> including a closed source binary module in the kernel distribution.
No, it is not comparable at all with that. There are no license
problems with the document -- it is GPL'd.
It describes the same thing as Documentation/SubmittingPatches does, and
is very relevant to kernel development.
> Moving the document to the BK website would be nicer, and would
> certainly assauge bad feelings regarding such an integral implicit
> endorsement of a tool.
Removing the doc from the kernel sources would be a token gesture only.
Some developers disagree violently with the use of non-open-source tools
at all, and that is a fundamental disagreement.
The majority of the "silently seething" developers, I imagine, are only
gonna be satisfied when (a) BitKeeper is GPL'd or (b) Linus stops using
BitKeeper. Both of these seem very remote possibilities at present.
Jeff
P.S. The doc is _not_ going on the BK website by my hand. (though I
have given BitMover permission to post the doc whereever they wish)
I can maintain my own docs much better than Larry can :)
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Tue Apr 23 2002 - 22:00:32 EST