Man, talk about shooting yourself in the foot…
KernelTrap has a lengthy article detailing BitMover’s recent decision to drop support for its free version of BitKeeper. Linus Torvalds began using BitKeeper back in February of 2002, a decision that has resulted in frequent flamefests, but also in increased kernel development productivity. Evidently the recent decision was due to OSDL’s decision to keep paying a developer who was working on reverse engineering BitKeeper… What tool Linus will move to is still being determined. (via Slashdot)
I can’t even being to say how much this pisses me off. Larry McVoy created a fantastic tool. One which he rightfully decided that he should make money with to support the people he hired to build it. The decision by BitMover to give this tool to the Linux developers for free, provided that no one took apart their software to figure out how it worked was a fantastic, extremely nice gesture. So what did Larry get in return for doing this? Hate mail. Yep that’s right, it wasn’t good enough that people could use this great software, he had to give it away to the world and give away his company in order for some people to respect what he did.
So what ended up happening? The Linux kernel development community finally pushed him over the edge. Personally I am supprised that it took this long to happen. It’s really hard to give someone a gift and be slapped in the face for it.
So what happens now for Linux development? Well considering that there isn’t an opensource/free tool available that does what BitKeeper does, chances are good that Linus will convert back to the development model that existed pre BitKeeper… and that’s no source control, just flat files with patch based revisions.
Linus has said for a long time, “build me a good tool and I will use it”. For the past three years people have complained about the status-quo and haven’t done anything about it. Well, you just got what you wanted. Enjoy.