What Larry McVoy (bitkeeper) got wrong ....

[Dag-Erling Smørgrav]

Pedro Giffuni <pfg at FreeBSD.org> writes:
> I was in the process of preparing a port of bitkeeper and I found this:
>
> https://github.com/bitkeeper-scm/bitkeeper
>
> "The BitKeeper history needs to be written up but the short version is
> that it happened because Larry wanted to help Linux not turn into a
> bunch of splintered factions like 386BSD, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD,
> DragonFlyBSD, etc. He saw that the problem was one of tooling. ..."

This may be poorly written, but what they're trying to say is that there
was a serious risk of someone forking Linux solely because they were
tired of the Linus bottleneck, and a DVCS would help avoid that.  That's
not particularly shocking.  BitKeeper was the first semi-free DVCS and
possibly the second DVCS ever (the first being Sun TeamWare, also by
Larry McVoy).

Here's a real gem, though: "They stayed in it for three more years
before moving to Git because BitKeeper wasn't open source."  Because
clearly, McVoy throwing a hissy fit and revoking their license had
nothing to do with it.

DES
-- 
Dag-Erling Smørgrav - des at des.no