3 ms·

Imagine having the most famous open source project using your product for the world to see and losing all that free publicity in a desperate attempt for control

• toyg 3y ago
  In a way, he got enough publicity - we still know about it, so many years later. But he lost the opportunity to remain central to the booming FOSS ecosystem, and all that it entails.
• rlnorthcutt 3y ago
  No kidding
• dagw 3y ago
  Yea BitKeeper was a one hell of a story. They also had a clause that holders of commercial BitKeepers licenses could not develop competing products and even forced a company to ban one of their employees from contributing to Mercurial(?) or the whole company would have their BitKeeper license revoked. The sad part is that BitKeeper really was an amazing product and way ahead of its time, pioneering many of the features git later made popular. Had they just been a bit smarter about the whole thing they could be where git (and GitHub) is today Ironically the last thing they did before going bankrupt was release BitKeeper as Open Source.