Re: Bitkeeper

[Shawn <core@enodev.com>]

Again, to add to that, the very existence of BK2SVN and BK2CVS would
seem support the assertion that the license/copyright allow
"work-(sort-of)-alike" developers like (SVN guys) to use the protocol
gateways. It only prevents them from using BK itself.

Really, the existence of the gateways was the end-all answer to the
arguments folks had. The only thing really left is that the gateways
operate on the charity of Larry.

So, just keep those repos up to date from the gateways, and if they stop
working one day, then bitch. But understand, Larry is well within his
rights in all his assertions; he's just quite a bit right of hard line
GNU.

On Fri, 2003-07-18 at 15:44, Larry McVoy wrote:
> I'm trying hard to stay out of this, I think Richard may be trolling,
> but I need to make sure that people understand that what Richard is 
> suggesting is violation of our license and copyright.
> 
> On Fri, Jul 18, 2003 at 03:51:36PM -0400, Richard Stallman wrote:
> > I think it would be appropriate at this point to write a free client
> > that talks with Bitkeeper, and for Linux developers to start switching
> > to that from Bitkeeper.  At that point, McVoy will face a hard choice:
> > if he carries out these threats, he risks alienating the community
> > that he hopes will market Bitkeeper for him.
> 
> Our license states that you can't use BK if you are developing a similar
> system, i.e., a clone.  Without using BK it's impossible to reverse
> engineer BK to create the clone.  So your message seems to be saying
> "it would be appropriate at this point to violate the BitKeeper license
> in order to write a free client which talks with BitKeeper".
> 
> Are you really instructing people to go out and violate our license?