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Heh, nice to see this again. If Sun had had the balls to do this perhaps they'd still be around. And if I had had the balls to do it with BitKeeper perhaps th

Heh, nice to see this again. If Sun had had the balls to do this perhaps they'd still be around. And if I had had the balls to do it with BitKeeper perhaps there would be a bithub. Shoulda, coulda, woulda.

Aloha 11y ago
I thought when I read this "well, thats exactly what they did, 20 years later..." I get the choice you made with BitKeeper, its very hard to turn away from that stream of semi predictable revenue, to the wild unknown, hindsight is always 20/20.
- luckydude 11y ago
  The problem we had was no money. Sun was in a different place, they sold hardware, the software was a tax. They could have made the software open source and built an ecosystem around them. There wasn't any hardware in BK. So it was a bigger stretch. I would have loved to figure out a way to do it but I didn't find a way.
  - Aloha 11y ago
    Solaris could have lived on, I'm still not quite sure about Sun, moving from the hardware market to just software would have killed them had Oracle bought them. I believe Vendor Lock in is what keeps Sparc alive. As far as BK - I work on a similarly specialized software product as a hobby, a friend of mine owns it, and I've advocated a bunch of times for open source - in the end support contracts I think would end up being as much money as we currently get out of licensing, with the added benefit of the ease of adding developers, but its his baby, and he cant give it up.
- chubot 11y ago
  Yeah but it's not like any of the authors of Git really made any money. The people behind Github, on the other hand, made a very nice business for themselves. It's far from a given that if you develop Git, you can/will develop Github. I'm not making any value judgement here, just observing reality. But I do think it's better for society if people who create value are rewarded. To have a business have to both create value and capture a part of it.

Aloha 11y ago

I thought when I read this "well, thats exactly what they did, 20 years later..." I get the choice you made with BitKeeper, its very hard to turn away from that stream of semi predictable revenue, to the wild unknown, hindsight is always 20/20.

luckydude 11y ago
The problem we had was no money. Sun was in a different place, they sold hardware, the software was a tax. They could have made the software open source and built an ecosystem around them. There wasn't any hardware in BK. So it was a bigger stretch. I would have loved to figure out a way to do it but I didn't find a way.
- Aloha 11y ago
  Solaris could have lived on, I'm still not quite sure about Sun, moving from the hardware market to just software would have killed them had Oracle bought them. I believe Vendor Lock in is what keeps Sparc alive. As far as BK - I work on a similarly specialized software product as a hobby, a friend of mine owns it, and I've advocated a bunch of times for open source - in the end support contracts I think would end up being as much money as we currently get out of licensing, with the added benefit of the ease of adding developers, but its his baby, and he cant give it up.
chubot 11y ago
Yeah but it's not like any of the authors of Git really made any money. The people behind Github, on the other hand, made a very nice business for themselves. It's far from a given that if you develop Git, you can/will develop Github. I'm not making any value judgement here, just observing reality. But I do think it's better for society if people who create value are rewarded. To have a business have to both create value and capture a part of it.