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To really copy BitKeeper Mercurial would need to start charging for use and come out in Basic, Pro and Enterprise editions, with things like BAM support disable

by gaoshan 15y ago

To really copy BitKeeper Mercurial would need to start charging for use and come out in Basic, Pro and Enterprise editions, with things like BAM support disabled at the lowest level. Fortunately they don't do this.

luckydude 15y ago
It's easier to copy than it is to invent stuff, sad but true. hg has a long history of doing illegal copies of BK tech, we could have sued them out of existence years ago. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, so I guess we should be flattered :) Legalities aside, the point I've made for about a decade now is that it would be interesting to see a release announcement from hg where I went "That's cool! Why didn't we think of that?" As for the 3 levels of product, um, when you build commercial products with commercial support, you don't do that? You really want only one offering? That doesn't play well in the commercial world, we tried that. If you are just taking a dig at commercial software, sorry about that, but we have to pay for dev somehow. I'd love a way to open source the thing and make money, haven't found it.
- tghw 15y ago
  hg has a long history of doing illegal copies of BK tech Huh? Are you claiming that Mercurial stole code from BitKeeper? Or does BitKeeper have patents on these fairly obvious concepts? I mean, a large file store on a centralized server isn't exactly a novel concept. Other than that you don't provide any examples of "illegal copies".
  - luckydude 15y ago
    It's a fairly long and pretty sordid story that ended with a certain hacker's employer sitting down with us and saying "We're not admiting that he did it, but just hypothetically speaking, suppose he did. What do you want?" And we said "we want him to stop his illegal activity". And he finally did and we dropped it, we're not on the lawyering business. We could have made a pretty big stink about it, it's not one of open source's finer moments, but all we wanted was a level playing field, we got that, we moved on.
    - deleted 15y ago
      [deleted]
    - garenp 15y ago
      I'm guessing you're referring to this: http://lwn.net/Articles/153990/ http://lwn.net/Articles/153990/ I remember that, long ago; I don't think there's anything wrong with not wanting users of your product to leverage it to build a replacement nor disallowing it in the license. I think where people (including myself) have a problem, is claiming that mercurial somehow has ripped off something from BK. From vague memory, BK laid claim to using a DAG for a DVCS? I assume you must also think that if someone is first to implement something that can be trivially found in an introductory computer science text, they have a patentable claim? Ironic that "largefiles" is a user contributed extension, and that only mercurial seems to be guilty of "copying," but git must be so different that it's unworthy of being sued?
- rdtsc 15y ago
  > we could have sued them out of existence years ago really? but you didn't, from the goodness of your heart, right?
  - luckydude 15y ago
    We didn't see the upside of sueing and we could sure as heck see the PR down side. What would you have done? You got a well known hacker who all of the open source guys will side with, so you lose the PR battle, but the guy is ripping off your technology, his employer basically admitted that in front of your lawyer. What would you do?
    - rdtsc 15y ago
      Yeah, not sure, not an easy problem. Maybe go public? In open source world reputation is almost everything. Honesty figures in that well. If you have good proof, their reputation would be ruined. I personally don't care if this was RMS himself or Torvalds, if they are copying code from others as their own, I lose respect for them and will refuse to use or promote their projects. Maybe present it in an exploratory kind of blog post -- "So yeah we found this out and we don't know what to do, what does the community think?" Just make it public.
      - msbarnett 15y ago
        This is either him reminding everyone of the hissy-fit Bitkeeper threw when Tridgell telnet'd into a bitkeeper server and typed HELP, or the hissy-fit Bitkeeper threw when Bryan O'Sullivan dared to contribute to Mercurial while his employer held a license for Bitkeeper. Either way, the reminder that Bitkeeper's licensing terms are so utterly ridiculous that either of the above cases were considered in any way, shape, or form "nefarious" only strikes me as a good way to scare away even more potential customers from their product.
        luckydude 15y ago
        Tridge is not exactly telling the whole story. That telnet thing is quite but the part he left out is when Linus was at his house running BK commands and Tridge was snooping the network to figure out the protocol. There isn't any chance that Tridge figured out what to do by telneting to bkbits and I'll back that up with a $10K challenge for anyone to write the same code Tridge wrote, in the same time frame, with the only resource being telnet to bkbits.net. Go talk to Linus and see what he says about all this, don't take my word for it.
- pnathan 15y ago
  This is a very serious allegation. It would be nice if you substantiated your claims. One could be tempted to write off unsubstantiated claims otherwise. Hg 0.1 was released around 6 years ago, not a decade ago. http://lkml.indiana.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0504.2/0670.html http://lkml.indiana.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0504.2/0670.h...
  - luckydude 15y ago
    I'd be happy to do so if you can show me an outcome that is anything other than bad PR for us and an open source hacker looking like a jerk. We looked at this hard and for us the least bad outcome was to just to get the guy to stop and move on. Anything else was going to be like this thread, everyone saying it's not true and then, if they ever believed it was true, they'd still be pissed at us. If some credible person in the open source community wants to talk to us about it, look at the evidence, and confirm the facts and relay that back without naming names, that's fine with me.
    - brodie 15y ago
      I think you've already crossed the bad PR threshold, at least on HN. Substantiating your claims can only make your position more legitimate. It's hard to take this seriously based on hearsay.
      - luckydude 15y ago
        I'll think about it. It's not an easy choice, the guy in question is someone that I liked a lot, tried to hire him, he's a good guy other than this one issue. As much as I'd like to show you all that I'm right I'm not sure that dragging someone through the mud is worth it. I'll think on it. Thanks for the suggestion.

by gaoshan 15y ago

luckydude 15y ago

It's easier to copy than it is to invent stuff, sad but true. hg has a long history of doing illegal copies of BK tech, we could have sued them out of existence years ago. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, so I guess we should be flattered :) Legalities aside, the point I've made for about a decade now is that it would be interesting to see a release announcement from hg where I went "That's cool! Why didn't we think of that?" As for the 3 levels of product, um, when you build commercial products with commercial support, you don't do that? You really want only one offering? That doesn't play well in the commercial world, we tried that. If you are just taking a dig at commercial software, sorry about that, but we have to pay for dev somehow. I'd love a way to open source the thing and make money, haven't found it.

tghw 15y ago
hg has a long history of doing illegal copies of BK tech Huh? Are you claiming that Mercurial stole code from BitKeeper? Or does BitKeeper have patents on these fairly obvious concepts? I mean, a large file store on a centralized server isn't exactly a novel concept. Other than that you don't provide any examples of "illegal copies".
- luckydude 15y ago
  It's a fairly long and pretty sordid story that ended with a certain hacker's employer sitting down with us and saying "We're not admiting that he did it, but just hypothetically speaking, suppose he did. What do you want?" And we said "we want him to stop his illegal activity". And he finally did and we dropped it, we're not on the lawyering business. We could have made a pretty big stink about it, it's not one of open source's finer moments, but all we wanted was a level playing field, we got that, we moved on.
  - deleted 15y ago
    [deleted]
  - garenp 15y ago
    I'm guessing you're referring to this: http://lwn.net/Articles/153990/ http://lwn.net/Articles/153990/ I remember that, long ago; I don't think there's anything wrong with not wanting users of your product to leverage it to build a replacement nor disallowing it in the license. I think where people (including myself) have a problem, is claiming that mercurial somehow has ripped off something from BK. From vague memory, BK laid claim to using a DAG for a DVCS? I assume you must also think that if someone is first to implement something that can be trivially found in an introductory computer science text, they have a patentable claim? Ironic that "largefiles" is a user contributed extension, and that only mercurial seems to be guilty of "copying," but git must be so different that it's unworthy of being sued?
rdtsc 15y ago
> we could have sued them out of existence years ago really? but you didn't, from the goodness of your heart, right?
- luckydude 15y ago
  We didn't see the upside of sueing and we could sure as heck see the PR down side. What would you have done? You got a well known hacker who all of the open source guys will side with, so you lose the PR battle, but the guy is ripping off your technology, his employer basically admitted that in front of your lawyer. What would you do?
  - rdtsc 15y ago
    Yeah, not sure, not an easy problem. Maybe go public? In open source world reputation is almost everything. Honesty figures in that well. If you have good proof, their reputation would be ruined. I personally don't care if this was RMS himself or Torvalds, if they are copying code from others as their own, I lose respect for them and will refuse to use or promote their projects. Maybe present it in an exploratory kind of blog post -- "So yeah we found this out and we don't know what to do, what does the community think?" Just make it public.
    - msbarnett 15y ago
      This is either him reminding everyone of the hissy-fit Bitkeeper threw when Tridgell telnet'd into a bitkeeper server and typed HELP, or the hissy-fit Bitkeeper threw when Bryan O'Sullivan dared to contribute to Mercurial while his employer held a license for Bitkeeper. Either way, the reminder that Bitkeeper's licensing terms are so utterly ridiculous that either of the above cases were considered in any way, shape, or form "nefarious" only strikes me as a good way to scare away even more potential customers from their product.
      - luckydude 15y ago
        Tridge is not exactly telling the whole story. That telnet thing is quite but the part he left out is when Linus was at his house running BK commands and Tridge was snooping the network to figure out the protocol. There isn't any chance that Tridge figured out what to do by telneting to bkbits and I'll back that up with a $10K challenge for anyone to write the same code Tridge wrote, in the same time frame, with the only resource being telnet to bkbits.net. Go talk to Linus and see what he says about all this, don't take my word for it.
pnathan 15y ago
This is a very serious allegation. It would be nice if you substantiated your claims. One could be tempted to write off unsubstantiated claims otherwise. Hg 0.1 was released around 6 years ago, not a decade ago. http://lkml.indiana.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0504.2/0670.html http://lkml.indiana.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0504.2/0670.h...
- luckydude 15y ago
  I'd be happy to do so if you can show me an outcome that is anything other than bad PR for us and an open source hacker looking like a jerk. We looked at this hard and for us the least bad outcome was to just to get the guy to stop and move on. Anything else was going to be like this thread, everyone saying it's not true and then, if they ever believed it was true, they'd still be pissed at us. If some credible person in the open source community wants to talk to us about it, look at the evidence, and confirm the facts and relay that back without naming names, that's fine with me.
  - brodie 15y ago
    I think you've already crossed the bad PR threshold, at least on HN. Substantiating your claims can only make your position more legitimate. It's hard to take this seriously based on hearsay.
    - luckydude 15y ago
      I'll think about it. It's not an easy choice, the guy in question is someone that I liked a lot, tried to hire him, he's a good guy other than this one issue. As much as I'd like to show you all that I'm right I'm not sure that dragging someone through the mud is worth it. I'll think on it. Thanks for the suggestion.