Re: [Bitkeeper-announce] RFC: BK license change

david parsons (orc@pell.portland.or.us)
Fri, 23 Aug 2002 18:26:45 -0700 (PDT)


Larry McVoy wrote:
>
> No, we're not GPLing it but we are making a few adjustments and wanted to
> make sure that it was an improvement, not a regression, in the eyes of
> the free users. Sorry for the intrusion, I'll be as brief as possible.
>

> 3(c) Maintaining Open Source. Our intent was that the free use of
> BitKeeper was for the purpose of helping the open source community;
> it was not to provide commercial users a free product. We have had
> a number of cases where managers up to VPs have told their engineers
> "just don't put anything useful in the checkin comments and then we
> can use it for free". Not what we had in mind. So we're adding
> a clause which says that we reserve the right to insist that you
> make your repositories available on a public port within 15 days
> of the request.

This addendum is somewhat [1] annoying, because I switched over to
BK for _everything_ a couple of years ago and now I've got a
moderately large body of stuff that is NOT open source (my resume,
my dns, little proofs of concept projects that I did for people.
I've not made one red penny off any of this [particularly since the
economy has gone south and put me out of work for the past year.
But I'm still not opensourcing my resume.]) that's under bitkeeper.
If I upgrade to a bk that uses the new license, then I get to play
the exciting game of ``break the new license and defraud my former
employers'' [2], which is about as appealing as Linus's alternative
approach to resolving software patent issues.

____
david parsons \bi/ [1: pronounced ``extremely'']
\/ [2: or, alternatively, buy it, but this involves
bitmover actually telling me how much it would
cost AND having a job[3] so I could buy it.]
[3: The Oregon economy really sucks, so this is
filed under the category of ``sick jokes'' ]
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