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I wonder if BitKeeper owner Larry McVoy has ever regretted not open sourcing his software? Git tools is a whole industry now. The most promiment one, github, re

I wonder if BitKeeper owner Larry McVoy has ever regretted not open sourcing his software? Git tools is a whole industry now. The most promiment one, github, recently become one of the 100 most popular websites on the planet.

luckydude 12y ago
Regret it? Sure. I'd do it in a heartbeat if I could figure out how to make it work. Still would and there is plenty in BK that Git doesn't have. Like submodules that actually work exactly like a monolithic tree, just lets you clone what you need. But we've never figured out how to make it work financially. If anyone has any ideas I'm all ears (though pointing at github and saying "do that" isn't an idea that I can execute). BTW, BK used to be pretty darned close to open source, you got the source code under a funky license that said "don't take out the part that lets us make money". We stopped shipping the source when we learned that the very first thing that someone committed to the repo was taking out the part that let us make money.
- anonbanker 12y ago
  > Sure. I'd do it in a heartbeat if I could figure out how to make it work. just upload it to github. :)
  - luckydude 12y ago
    Have an upvote for making me laugh. It's not as far fetched as you might think though, we've been building million cset trees and git is so darn slow that we made a "bk fast-export" that spits out the stuff that git wants. Because Git was over 20x slower just running the commits.
- qzw 12y ago
  Very cool of you to share your thoughts. I sympathize with your dilemma. It seems that the people who end up making money out of free/open source software are often not the ones who write the code. And I remember reading back in the day that Linus would talk with you extensively about the nuts and bolts of DVCSs, so I'm sure all git users owe you some gratitude for inspiring him to create git and getting the fundamentals right from the get go. Out of curiosity, and please feel free not to answer, is BK still a viable commercial product bringing in significant revenue? And what obstacle do you see with going the platform/service route like github? I assume that's something you've seriously considered, even without open sourcing BK.
  - luckydude 12y ago
    Yeah, BK still pays the bills for our team. We're small though, I recently found out that perforce has around 250 people, we're less than 1/10th that. But we pull in millions a year, enough to pay our people above scale even in the bay area, so far, so good. I'll admit we've fallen off the radar (well, we were never really on the commercial radar, the only "marketing" we ever did was getting Linus to use it and that wasn't intended as marketing, it was intended to keep the kernel from diverging like the BSDs did. But it turned out to be a form of marketing that has kept us alive). We're gonna try some actual marketing. Stay tuned. We'll probably screw it up :) But we hired a marketing company, I've gone back to writing papers, we'll give it a try. If you have ideas on how we can put ourselves back out there, we'd love to hear them. As for viable, heck yeah. We work well on big repos (better than git), we've got what we call nested collections of repositories (did I mention I suck at marketing, yeah, I came up with what to call it) that are sort of like submodules except they work exactly like a single repo, sideways pulls work, anything that works with one repo works with N repos, that includes all the guis, command line, everything. We've got an answer for binaries that works for gaming companies. We've got a sane user interface (that's what Mercurial copied, in a somewhat sketchy way). Git is sort of like the wild west, it never met an idea it didn't want to implement (at least partially). We're more enterprise ready (yeah, over used term) in that we work hard to make sure that BK has all the guard rails, seat belts, etc, so that you can deploy to people who could care less how any SCM works and they don't drive themselves over a cliff. Definitely less cool than git in that we take away some (bad) options, but safer. We have seriously considered open sourcing a version of BK. We've been doing a lot of performance work and we essentially have two BK's, the almost SCCS compat ascii format slow version (slow but any version of BK will talk to it), and the fast one with a new binary file format (stuff like show the top commit comments are 35x faster in the linux kernel, that number goes up as you add more csets). We considered open sourcing the slow one but that effort has stalled. It could be revived, it just has to be worth it to us. The github ship, in my opinion, has sailed. Maybe we could have open sourced BK back before git and done a github thing but it's all flashy UI stuff and we sort of suck at that. We're really good at systems stuff (you'll see when we start doing marketing, we scale, git doesn't) but flashy? Not so much. We do our UI in tcl/tk (I know, I know, but we have one UI person who makes it all work on windows/linux/macos and tcl/tk is a big part of that. At least we wrote a C like language that compiles to tcl byte codes so we're out of tcl. Thank God.)
- thomasfl 12y ago
  It's really great to see you answer my question yourself! It seems to be much easier to create a business by using open source software, than writing open source software. Especially for small companies like yours that create complex software like BitKeeper.
ploxiln 12y ago
BitKeeper is still around, selling to a few large corporations. It's a very different business model. Git has a large industry of value-add / support companies now. But no one commercial company can own or control the core. And that's one key reason why it's so popular and has such a large ecosystem around it. So to be like git, bitkeeper would have had to really give up central ownership and control. Commercial companies never do that unless they're going out of business anyway, they just can't.

luckydude 12y ago

Regret it? Sure. I'd do it in a heartbeat if I could figure out how to make it work. Still would and there is plenty in BK that Git doesn't have. Like submodules that actually work exactly like a monolithic tree, just lets you clone what you need. But we've never figured out how to make it work financially. If anyone has any ideas I'm all ears (though pointing at github and saying "do that" isn't an idea that I can execute). BTW, BK used to be pretty darned close to open source, you got the source code under a funky license that said "don't take out the part that lets us make money". We stopped shipping the source when we learned that the very first thing that someone committed to the repo was taking out the part that let us make money.

anonbanker 12y ago
> Sure. I'd do it in a heartbeat if I could figure out how to make it work. just upload it to github. :)
- luckydude 12y ago
  Have an upvote for making me laugh. It's not as far fetched as you might think though, we've been building million cset trees and git is so darn slow that we made a "bk fast-export" that spits out the stuff that git wants. Because Git was over 20x slower just running the commits.
qzw 12y ago
Very cool of you to share your thoughts. I sympathize with your dilemma. It seems that the people who end up making money out of free/open source software are often not the ones who write the code. And I remember reading back in the day that Linus would talk with you extensively about the nuts and bolts of DVCSs, so I'm sure all git users owe you some gratitude for inspiring him to create git and getting the fundamentals right from the get go. Out of curiosity, and please feel free not to answer, is BK still a viable commercial product bringing in significant revenue? And what obstacle do you see with going the platform/service route like github? I assume that's something you've seriously considered, even without open sourcing BK.
- luckydude 12y ago
  Yeah, BK still pays the bills for our team. We're small though, I recently found out that perforce has around 250 people, we're less than 1/10th that. But we pull in millions a year, enough to pay our people above scale even in the bay area, so far, so good. I'll admit we've fallen off the radar (well, we were never really on the commercial radar, the only "marketing" we ever did was getting Linus to use it and that wasn't intended as marketing, it was intended to keep the kernel from diverging like the BSDs did. But it turned out to be a form of marketing that has kept us alive). We're gonna try some actual marketing. Stay tuned. We'll probably screw it up :) But we hired a marketing company, I've gone back to writing papers, we'll give it a try. If you have ideas on how we can put ourselves back out there, we'd love to hear them. As for viable, heck yeah. We work well on big repos (better than git), we've got what we call nested collections of repositories (did I mention I suck at marketing, yeah, I came up with what to call it) that are sort of like submodules except they work exactly like a single repo, sideways pulls work, anything that works with one repo works with N repos, that includes all the guis, command line, everything. We've got an answer for binaries that works for gaming companies. We've got a sane user interface (that's what Mercurial copied, in a somewhat sketchy way). Git is sort of like the wild west, it never met an idea it didn't want to implement (at least partially). We're more enterprise ready (yeah, over used term) in that we work hard to make sure that BK has all the guard rails, seat belts, etc, so that you can deploy to people who could care less how any SCM works and they don't drive themselves over a cliff. Definitely less cool than git in that we take away some (bad) options, but safer. We have seriously considered open sourcing a version of BK. We've been doing a lot of performance work and we essentially have two BK's, the almost SCCS compat ascii format slow version (slow but any version of BK will talk to it), and the fast one with a new binary file format (stuff like show the top commit comments are 35x faster in the linux kernel, that number goes up as you add more csets). We considered open sourcing the slow one but that effort has stalled. It could be revived, it just has to be worth it to us. The github ship, in my opinion, has sailed. Maybe we could have open sourced BK back before git and done a github thing but it's all flashy UI stuff and we sort of suck at that. We're really good at systems stuff (you'll see when we start doing marketing, we scale, git doesn't) but flashy? Not so much. We do our UI in tcl/tk (I know, I know, but we have one UI person who makes it all work on windows/linux/macos and tcl/tk is a big part of that. At least we wrote a C like language that compiles to tcl byte codes so we're out of tcl. Thank God.)
thomasfl 12y ago
It's really great to see you answer my question yourself! It seems to be much easier to create a business by using open source software, than writing open source software. Especially for small companies like yours that create complex software like BitKeeper.

ploxiln 12y ago

BitKeeper is still around, selling to a few large corporations. It's a very different business model. Git has a large industry of value-add / support companies now. But no one commercial company can own or control the core. And that's one key reason why it's so popular and has such a large ecosystem around it. So to be like git, bitkeeper would have had to really give up central ownership and control. Commercial companies never do that unless they're going out of business anyway, they just can't.