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.

If you disagree with a license then do not accept it, do not use the software, do not use the product.

Talking so high about freedom and rights, and then calling other people's rights trivial when they do not fit in your echo chamber of righteousness.

I believe tridge wanted to use his own client to talk to the server ergo this use case is a rejection of the license and product.

Copyright isn't a right in the sense that anyone uses that word.

He did a lot more that just issuing a command over a telnet session. Google for "SourcePuller".

The sourcepuller code looks almost trivial, at least for the clone operation?

http://sourcepuller.cvs.sourceforge.net/viewvc/sourcepuller/...

https://lwn.net/Articles/132938/

That's the implementation of the result. Not sure what your point is.