To really copy BitKeeper Mercurial would need to start charging for use and come out in Basic, Pro and Enterprise editions, with things like BAM support disabled at the lowest level. Fortunately they don't do this.
It's easier to copy than it is to invent stuff, sad but true. hg has a long history of doing illegal copies of BK tech, we could have sued them out of existence years ago. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, so I guess we should be flattered :)
Legalities aside, the point I've made for about a decade now is that it would be interesting to see a release announcement from hg where I went "That's cool! Why didn't we think of that?"
As for the 3 levels of product, um, when you build commercial products with commercial support, you don't do that? You really want only one offering? That doesn't play well in the commercial world, we tried that. If you are just taking a dig at commercial software, sorry about that, but we have to pay for dev somehow. I'd love a way to open source the thing and make money, haven't found it.
It's a fairly long and pretty sordid story that ended with a certain hacker's employer sitting down with us and saying "We're not admiting that he did it, but just hypothetically speaking, suppose he did. What do you want?"
And we said "we want him to stop his illegal activity". And he finally did and we dropped it, we're not on the lawyering business. We could have made a pretty big stink about it, it's not one of open source's finer moments, but all we wanted was a level playing field, we got that, we moved on.
I remember that, long ago; I don't think there's anything wrong with not wanting users of your product to leverage it to build a replacement nor disallowing it in the license.
I think where people (including myself) have a problem, is claiming that mercurial somehow has ripped off something from BK. From vague memory, BK laid claim to using a DAG for a DVCS? I assume you must also think that if someone is first to implement something that can be trivially found in an introductory computer science text, they have a patentable claim?
Ironic that "largefiles" is a user contributed extension, and that only mercurial seems to be guilty of "copying," but git must be so different that it's unworthy of being sued?
This is a very serious allegation. It would be nice if you substantiated your claims. One could be tempted to write off unsubstantiated claims otherwise.
Hg 0.1 was released around 6 years ago, not a decade ago.
I'd be happy to do so if you can show me an outcome that is anything other than bad PR for us and an open source hacker looking like a jerk. We looked at this hard and for us the least bad outcome was to just to get the guy to stop and move on. Anything else was going to be like this thread, everyone saying it's not true and then, if they ever believed it was true, they'd still be pissed at us.
If some credible person in the open source community wants to talk to us about it, look at the evidence, and confirm the facts and relay that back without naming names, that's fine with me.
I'll think about it. It's not an easy choice, the guy in question is someone that I liked a lot, tried to hire him, he's a good guy other than this one issue. As much as I'd like to show you all that I'm right I'm not sure that dragging someone through the mud is worth it.
After a bit of digging, I learned that BitKeeper has, as a part of its EULA, a provision that disallows its users to contribute to other source control projects[1]. Larry McVoy (aka luckydude) has actually tried to enforce the EULA by contacting the users' employers to get them to stop contributing, but my guess is that he never took it to court because, well, he would be laughed right back out again.
As for Mercuiral, one of the early developers, Bryan O'Sullivan, apparently worked for a company that used BK, and McVoy told him that he had to stop contributing[2] to the project, which he did[3]. O'Sullivan is now showing up in the commit history again, which I presume means he's no longer working for a company that uses BK.
We didn't see the upside of sueing and we could sure as heck see the PR down side.
What would you have done? You got a well known hacker who all of the open source guys will side with, so you lose the PR battle, but the guy is ripping off your technology, his employer basically admitted that in front of your lawyer. What would you do?
Yeah, not sure, not an easy problem. Maybe go public? In open source world reputation is almost everything. Honesty figures in that well. If you have good proof, their reputation would be ruined.
I personally don't care if this was RMS himself or Torvalds, if they are copying code from others as their own, I lose respect for them and will refuse to use or promote their projects.
Maybe present it in an exploratory kind of blog post -- "So yeah we found this out and we don't know what to do, what does the community think?" Just make it public.
This is either him reminding everyone of the hissy-fit Bitkeeper threw when Tridgell telnet'd into a bitkeeper server and typed HELP, or the hissy-fit Bitkeeper threw when Bryan O'Sullivan dared to contribute to Mercurial while his employer held a license for Bitkeeper.
Either way, the reminder that Bitkeeper's licensing terms are so utterly ridiculous that either of the above cases were considered in any way, shape, or form "nefarious" only strikes me as a good way to scare away even more potential customers from their product.
Tridge is not exactly telling the whole story. That telnet thing is quite but the part he left out is when Linus was at his house running BK commands and Tridge was snooping the network to figure out the protocol. There isn't any chance that Tridge figured out what to do by telneting to bkbits and I'll back that up with a $10K challenge for anyone to write the same code Tridge wrote, in the same time frame, with the only resource being telnet to bkbits.net.
Go talk to Linus and see what he says about all this, don't take my word for it.
People don't take your word for it though, so it's much ado about nothing. The burden of proof is on you, not anyone else ("Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence") hence no need to "go talk to Linus," because your claims are so highly suspect.
Because, really, nobody thinks BK contains some kind of rocket science for anyone to rip off in the first place. If there is, IMNSHO I don't see it in the mercurial or git sources, which is readily available to anyone. Hence why nobody takes seriously what you, or even a supposed "employer" or "lawyer" says either (and what your lawyer would say is even more highly suspect :)).
And if all this supposed restraint is due to some kind of self-interested, game theoretic calculation as you imply, why does that same thinking not restrain you from touting unverifiable claims? It's only generating "bad PR" for you which you wish to avoid, makes you look bad, and by extension your claims ever more doubtful. That can't be good for business.
Alright luckydude, moment of truth. Does your EULA say what another poster here quoted -- that it prevents the employees of the company from contributing to Open Source projects?
Here's the scoop. We kinda invented the whole distributed source management thing, go to google groups (if they are still there) and do a date search for changeset before 1998. Now do one today. That's all us. (in case they aren't still there, there were something like 16 hits for changeset before us and now there are zillions.) Is that proof we invented it, I dunno, it's something. We certainly raised awareness that Subversion, which started when we started, wasn't the way to go.
What our EULA said, and says, is while you are using our system you can't contribute to an open source system that competes with us. If you want to work on some other open source you are fine. When you stop using our system, have the big fun, but while using it, no copying our stuff to some open source clone. Yeah, I know that makes many (all?) of you insanely pissed off. But we invented this stuff, we've been ahead of the curve a bunch of times, and open source is always right there ready to "rewrite" whatever we invent. Is it really so unreasonable that we don't want to hand whatever is next cool thing (in source management, right, that's cool :) to people and say "here ya go, have at it, copy it"?
We don't think so because we spend tons of time and money figuring out a right answer. It was a lot of work and just like you, we'd like to reap some benefits from our work.
