Just 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

Just 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.