What Tridge did was something to prove a point rather than to make a feasible BK alternative, so it was ultimately a stunt. I don't dismiss the importance of it and LKP should've not indeed depend on a proprietary tool, but it was one of less civil ways to go about the issue.
Stunt? Here is the description of the oh-so-cunning reverse engineering: Tridgell telnetted to the port and typed 'help': https://lwn.net/Articles/132938/
This does not matter one bit. Bitkeeper offered the use of a product under a condition, in other words, a license. And it offered the product for free, expecting the license to be honoured. Every open source developer should respect and uphold that agreement, once entered by both sides.
Your personal opinion of the license terms is irrelevant. You respect other people's license, because you want them to follow yours. If developers can not grasp that, how do we expect users to?
Using a license to limit others freedom to access and use their own data to maximize the opportunity for the developer to profit is a bug not a feature and its nothing anyone least of all developers ought to respect. Not only is the world composed of 99.99% users 0.01% developers but even developers are net consumers of software consuming 1000 x what they will ever create and profit from.
Everyone's freedom is so vastly more important than a trivial few's wholly imaginary "right" to profit. Software is anymore the building block of civilization, culture, business. Valuing the right to restrict others over everyone's interests is a strange inversion of priorities.
Why ought someone expect people to be worried about politeness insofar as accessing their own data. Conflict solely existed based on a badly thought out expectation on the part of bitkeeper. If you look at the reaction this wasn't going to be something that could be delicately handled in any case.
