Re: [BK] upgrade will be needed

From: David Lang
Date: Mon Feb 14 2005 - 18:28:32 EST

Larry, I don't think he's talking about making the free bk be a striped down version, I think he's talking about having two different free versions.

version 1
what you have today with the license you need to protect yourself

version 2
a version with no check-in capability at all, all it can do is passivly mirror a repository to a local system and check-out a tree to a local system. since this version won't have any of your 'secret sauce merging stuff' in it it may be possible for you to use a license that doesn't need to include the non-compete clause.

anyone doing development would need version1, but there are a number of people who have bitkeeper installed but only use it to check out versions and really don't care about the differences between bk and cvs for this (and for this purpose the differences are mainly network efficiancies)

Assuming that this is techincaly posible (my memory is warning me that the pull from a remote repository may be a 'check-in' as things are currently written) I think the risk to you would that the new license would let some of the people who want to reverse-engineer things use this 'fetch-only' version and see some of the meta-data, I don't know if you can leave out enough of the stuff you care about to be willing to loose the rest.

As you acknowledged in your presentation this last weekend, the people at the bottom of the tree don't get much benifit from bitkeeper, this applies even more so to the people who are read-only to the system.

this does mean that there would be somehat of a commiter/non-commiter split, with the difference between them being those who agree to the non-compete license of #1 and those who don't and use #2 to have a local read-only copy and have to use normal patches to submit changes up the tree.

David Lang

On Mon, 14 Feb 2005 lm@xxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:

Date: Mon, 14 Feb 2005 14:57:04 -0800
From: lm@xxxxxxxxxxxx
To: Gerold Jury <gjury@xxxxxxxx>
Cc: Linux Kernel Mailing List <linux-kernel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
Jeff Sipek <jeffpc@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
Bartlomiej Zolnierkiewicz <bzolnier@xxxxxxxxx>
Subject: Re: [BK] upgrade will be needed

On Mon, Feb 14, 2005 at 11:24:43PM +0100, Gerold Jury wrote:
Hi Larry
Hi Everyone

Do you think it is possible to make a split licence that will distinguish
between active changes and passive watching/tracking ?

A lot of people have told us to create two products, the free product
and the commercial product, and license the free product with standard
licensing terms. The expectation is that we would somehow make the free
product less desirable so that people bought the commercial product.

That's an excellent suggestion if our only goal is to make money, that
makes the free product sort of a teaser and the commercial product the
real deal. However, the goal really is to help the open source
community, Linux in particular. If we give away crippled software then
all the people who say we are just a money grubbing corporation are
more or less correct. At that point we aren't giving away the good
stuff and it was always the goal that you got the latest and greatest
because that's what can do you the most good.

However, it sure sounds like the noisy people would be a lot happier
with a stripped down BK that didn't have as many of the restrictions.
And a possible out for even the open source users is that they buy seats
if they really need the more powerful features. Or we could donate
some on a case by case basis.

If the hackers who are using BK can reach agreement that it would be
better if the BK they had didn't move forward unless they got commercial
seats then we could start moving towards a license on the free product
that was less restrictive. What that would mean is that the BK you have
is basically it, we'd not advance it other than keeping it up to date
with the protocol and/or file formats of the commercial version. If you
think BK is good enough, fast enough, done enough that you don't want
what we have coming down the pike we can go that route.

I suspect that the heavy lifters really would like a faster BK with more
features that help them get their job done but the rank and file could
care less, they just want checkin/checkout.
--
---
Larry McVoy lm at bitmover.com http://www.bitkeeper.com
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