My impression is that BitKeeper was designed with an eye towards Linus's own habits, and my point was that BitKeeper suffered as a result. As best I can reconst

My impression is that BitKeeper was designed with an eye towards Linus's own habits, and my point was that BitKeeper suffered as a result. As best I can reconstruct I seem to have gotten this impression from this article: http://web.mit.edu/ghudson/thoughts/bitkeeper.whynot http://web.mit.edu/ghudson/thoughts/bitkeeper.whynot "From the beginning, Bitkeeper has been aimed at making it easier to do development the way Linux kernel development is done. As Larry McVoy put it: 'BK makes it really easy to do what Linus is doing.'" If you follow the links in that article, Larry McVoy doesn't really say what he's quoted as saying there, though he does make similar assertions. BitKeeper certainly made no money on supporting Linux but I think the idea, on some level, must have been to get the software out there being used by serious programmers who would then love it, buy it, and evangelize it. In the driest sense, it was not a success. But in a wider sense in backfired so thoroughly that the idea of starting a commercial VCS project at this point is laughably absurd. Several things McVoy said turned out to be wrong, even though they must have sounded plausible at the time. I'm particularly pointing to this one: "All you people trying to copy BK are just shooting yourself in the foot unless you can come up with a solution that Linus will use in the short term. And nobody but an idiot believes that is possible." http://lkml.indiana.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0303.1/0315.html http://lkml.indiana.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0303.1/0315.h... So, it probably isn't the best analogy, but on the other hand it was the first one that came to mind. :) I'd be curious to know what you think about this, and more importantly what your opinion of BK is today and how it compares after having a decade to mature.