Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

> Tridge also reverse engineered BitKeeper, the proprietary software that Linus foolishly used to host Linux kernel development for a while.

I wouldn't necessarily call it 'foolish': Linus used the best available tool at the time. (I don't know whether BitKeeper was the best available tool in some absolute sense, but Linus looked around and evaluated many of them.)

> [...] you can type "help" and it then spits out a list of commands to try...

That was actually a nice engineering / UI decisions by the BitKeeper developers, but I'm afraid the morale of the story would be not to make your software too helpful?

> You can then interrogate the repository with these commands and get a complete understanding of all the internal data structures, without ever using the proprietary software, let alone having to disassemble it.

That's a strange use of 'use'? Clearly, talking to some software over the network is 'using' it?



> That's a strange use of 'use'? Clearly, talking to some software over the network is 'using' it?

The point is that the proprietary client software was not used.


That makes sense.


> I wouldn't necessarily call it 'foolish'

It was foolish because, by selecting it, Linus was endorsing use of non-free software to work on one of the premier free software projects. It gave Larry McVoy unwarranted control over Linux kernel developers.

As rms said at the time: "The spirit of the Bitkeeper license is the spirit of the whip hand. It is the spirit that says, "You have no right to use Bitkeeper, only temporary privileges that we can revoke. Be grateful that we allow you to use Bitkeeper. Be grateful, and don't do anything we dislike, or we may revoke those privileges." https://marc.info/?l=linux-kernel&m=103454948625224&w=2

It caused animosity for years and was resolved by Linus writing git, famously in 10 days. Could he not have taken 10 days off in 2002 and written his preferred DVCS then?

The moral of the story is: don't use proprietary software. It will bite you in the ass.

"Torvalds seems to have fallen for the “free beer” argument: He didn’t have to pay for BitKeeper, so he figured it was good enough. But not having to pay is not, and has never been, the real purpose of free software. The point is to avoid the situation Torvalds eventually found himself in: McVoy didn’t like how his product was being used, so he took his ball and went home. Could you afford to switch gears in the middle of a project if one of your key software vendors did the same?" https://www.infoworld.com/article/2211030/linus-torvalds-bit...

> That's a strange use of 'use'?

To "use" software is to copy it into your computer's memory/CPU to execute it, for which courts have said you need a copyright license. You don't need a copyright license to connect to an open network port and interrogate it (or even capture packets of other people's conversations). US courts have also affirmed that web-scraping is a legal way to collect information because you're just throwing the data out there to anyone who asks; if you want to force people to agree to terms and conditions to see data or "use" web-software, you have to make them login or supply a key that you only issue _after_ they agree to your license or contract.

Andrew Tridgell did not even use anything which would require him to accede to Larry's license. It wrecked Larry's desire that nobody work on a "competing" tool to his, and there was nothing he could do about it, which is why he took his ball and went home.


Linus said it took longer to design, maybe he wasn't ready in 2002.

"So I’d like to stress that while it really came together in just about ten days or so (at which point I did my first kernel commit using git), it wasn’t like it was some kind of mad dash of coding. The actual amount of that early code is actually fairly small, it all depended on getting the basic ideas right. And that I had been mulling over for a while before the whole project started. I’d seen the problems others had. I’d seen what I wanted to avoid doing." https://www.linuxfoundation.org/blog/blog/10-years-of-git-an...


> Clearly, talking to some software over the network is 'using' it?

In some sense, yes. But I wouldn't say my mom uses Linux when she uses her Ipad to visit a website hosted on a Linux server.


Possibly not, however the passive "Linux is being used" would still be a valid observation.

In this case, the software (or a component of the software's ecosystem) was "in use" over the network.


Maybe. But in some sense, if you use a classic X application, it's all done over the network, too.




Consider applying for YC's Fall 2025 batch! Applications are open till Aug 4

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: