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

[Greg 'groggy' Lehey]

On Saturday, 23 July 2016 at 19:31:13 +0200, Dag-Erling Smørgrav wrote:
> 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.

I'm left wondering about the accuracy of the statement, though.  I
didn't think that this was the reason lm wrote Bitkeeper.  I contacted
him, but he wasn't much help.

> 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.

I think this is a nice way of glossing over the ugly facts.  I don't
see that it's wrong.

Greg
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