4 ms·

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 s

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.
    - garenp 15y ago
      People don't take your word for it though, so it's much ado about nothing. The burden of proof is on you, not anyone else ("Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence") hence no need to "go talk to Linus," because your claims are so highly suspect. Because, really, nobody thinks BK contains some kind of rocket science for anyone to rip off in the first place. If there is, IMNSHO I don't see it in the mercurial or git sources, which is readily available to anyone. Hence why nobody takes seriously what you, or even a supposed "employer" or "lawyer" says either (and what your lawyer would say is even more highly suspect :)). And if all this supposed restraint is due to some kind of self-interested, game theoretic calculation as you imply, why does that same thinking not restrain you from touting unverifiable claims? It's only generating "bad PR" for you which you wish to avoid, makes you look bad, and by extension your claims ever more doubtful. That can't be good for business.
rdtsc 15y ago
Alright luckydude, moment of truth. Does your EULA say what another poster here quoted -- that it prevents the employees of the company from contributing to Open Source projects?
- luckydude 15y ago
  Wow, I sure hope that's not what people think. Here's the scoop. We kinda invented the whole distributed source management thing, go to google groups (if they are still there) and do a date search for changeset before 1998. Now do one today. That's all us. (in case they aren't still there, there were something like 16 hits for changeset before us and now there are zillions.) Is that proof we invented it, I dunno, it's something. We certainly raised awareness that Subversion, which started when we started, wasn't the way to go. What our EULA said, and says, is while you are using our system you can't contribute to an open source system that competes with us. If you want to work on some other open source you are fine. When you stop using our system, have the big fun, but while using it, no copying our stuff to some open source clone. Yeah, I know that makes many (all?) of you insanely pissed off. But we invented this stuff, we've been ahead of the curve a bunch of times, and open source is always right there ready to "rewrite" whatever we invent. Is it really so unreasonable that we don't want to hand whatever is next cool thing (in source management, right, that's cool :) to people and say "here ya go, have at it, copy it"? We don't think so because we spend tons of time and money figuring out a right answer. It was a lot of work and just like you, we'd like to reap some benefits from our work.

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.
  - garenp 15y ago
    People don't take your word for it though, so it's much ado about nothing. The burden of proof is on you, not anyone else ("Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence") hence no need to "go talk to Linus," because your claims are so highly suspect. Because, really, nobody thinks BK contains some kind of rocket science for anyone to rip off in the first place. If there is, IMNSHO I don't see it in the mercurial or git sources, which is readily available to anyone. Hence why nobody takes seriously what you, or even a supposed "employer" or "lawyer" says either (and what your lawyer would say is even more highly suspect :)). And if all this supposed restraint is due to some kind of self-interested, game theoretic calculation as you imply, why does that same thinking not restrain you from touting unverifiable claims? It's only generating "bad PR" for you which you wish to avoid, makes you look bad, and by extension your claims ever more doubtful. That can't be good for business.

rdtsc 15y ago

Alright luckydude, moment of truth. Does your EULA say what another poster here quoted -- that it prevents the employees of the company from contributing to Open Source projects?

luckydude 15y ago
Wow, I sure hope that's not what people think. Here's the scoop. We kinda invented the whole distributed source management thing, go to google groups (if they are still there) and do a date search for changeset before 1998. Now do one today. That's all us. (in case they aren't still there, there were something like 16 hits for changeset before us and now there are zillions.) Is that proof we invented it, I dunno, it's something. We certainly raised awareness that Subversion, which started when we started, wasn't the way to go. What our EULA said, and says, is while you are using our system you can't contribute to an open source system that competes with us. If you want to work on some other open source you are fine. When you stop using our system, have the big fun, but while using it, no copying our stuff to some open source clone. Yeah, I know that makes many (all?) of you insanely pissed off. But we invented this stuff, we've been ahead of the curve a bunch of times, and open source is always right there ready to "rewrite" whatever we invent. Is it really so unreasonable that we don't want to hand whatever is next cool thing (in source management, right, that's cool :) to people and say "here ya go, have at it, copy it"? We don't think so because we spend tons of time and money figuring out a right answer. It was a lot of work and just like you, we'd like to reap some benefits from our work.