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BitKeeper actually prohibits their customers from contributing to competing projects? Using the product to reverse-engineer a protocol to develop a free client
by Confusion 15y ago
BitKeeper actually prohibits their customers from contributing to competing projects?
Using the product to reverse-engineer a protocol to develop a free client is not 'contributing to a competing product'. Which is against their license (though that may be void because the law grants you reverse-engineering rights, no matter what a license says. Otherwise nothing could ever be reverse-engineered at all).
they were afraid that he "might be moving BitKeeper technology into Mercurial."
That's entirely reasonable. If you have deep knowledge of how proprietary system A works and are hacking on free system B that purports to do the same thing, there is every chance you inadvertently include proprietary knowledge into your code for the free product. It's very hard to avoid using the knowledge you have.
- jackowayed 15y agoJust to be clear: a) I'm not talking about the reverse-engineering thing. Them wanting to shut that down is somewhat reasonable. b) I don't think this guy had "deep knowledge of how [BitKeeper] works." He just used BitKeeper at his job. Most people who use git don't have a deep understanding of how it works. They just know how to make it manage their code. It feels pretty evil to me to provide a general development tool and put limitations on what any developer who uses it may do. What if Microsoft said in their license, "If you are a Windows user, you may not contribute to any other operating system."? We'd complain about how evil and anticompetitive Microsoft is.
- rimmjob 15y agoin this case, saying "there's a chance" is the same as saying it's impossible to prove either which way.