Well, for what' it's worth, the BitKeeper stuff really got rolling after
Linus, Dave Miller, and Richard Henderson came by for dinner and we hashed
out how the solution should work. That picture got refined through talks
with people like Eric Raymond (who came up with the patch file format,
or at least a comment he made prompted the design), and kernel folks
like Alan, Ted, and Stephen at Linux Expo. So not only is BitKeeper
not the first thing to come along, it's also not like it's just some
dream I have concocted in a vacuum. It's been, and will continue to be,
a process that gets changed by the needs of the primary developers.
: If the licensing of a product makes me uncomfortable, I won't use it.
: Simple. Effective. I'm happy, and the more people who vote like me, the
: bigger the hint passed along to the licensee. *shrug*
:
: And I think some free software developers (myself included) would find
: your depiction of GPL'd software as being 'half-assed' more than a little
: insulting. You're lumping Linux, glibc, egcs, etc. into this mix too, I
: suppose?
He's just being honest. If you push on it enough, you'll corner
people into speaking the truth. I can point to lots of stuff where the
list of things you mentioned isn't even "half assed", it's more like
"quarter assed". No disrespect was meant on either his (if he'll let
me speak for him briefly) or my parts. It's just a statement of fact.
You can choose to argue and then we can have a big flamewar over what
is and isn't half assed about these projects compared with commercial
versions, but that misses the point. The point is that unless there
is some money involved, there are a bunch of problems that just don't
get addressed. That doesn't detract one iota from the problems that do
get fixed, it's just an observation.
: Note the "may not restrict...from being used in a business"?
:
: Requiring royalties or payment for use is an additional restriction on
: use. The license for BitKeeper, no matter how it's worded, will violate
: this point, and hence will fail to meet both the Open Source Definition
: and the Debian Free Software Guidelines.
Unless you can go back and show where anyone said BitKeeper was trying
to claim that it was open source, your point is meaningless.
Furthermore, unless you are personally willing to fund all of the work
that doesn't get done, or are going to show how the open source license
is going to get that work done, you are missing another important point:
how do you fund the stuff that noone wants to do for free? That question
needs to get answered. I don't care what the answer is so long as the
work gets done. This posturing about the great opensource license is
fun and all, but it doesn't get the work done that noone wants to do.
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