Re: Software relicensing, how is it done ?

[Dave Neary <dneary gnome org>]

Hi,

Just some (potentially biased) historical context for Bitkeeper...

Tristan Van Berkom wrote:
> On Fri, Oct 31, 2008 at 3:21 PM, Hubert Figuiere <hub figuiere net> wrote:
>> No yet another BitKeeper-like situation. We have seen what it does.
> 
> I'm not 100% schooled on what exactly happened with BitKeeper, but my
> base understanding is that the developers found ways to work around the
> license in order to base a new work on free work, drop the free one
> and only support proprietary extensions of BitKeeper ?

Linus decided that Bitkeeper was fine for his needs, and started using
it and publishing his repository in a public Bitkeeper repository.
Bitkeeper guy (Larry McVoy) gave free copies of the client to free
software developers.

Over the years, more & more edge cases of things which Larry found
unacceptable happened - he added a clause which forbade reverse
engineering the client to get at the protocol, and another clause
refusing people the right to use a bitkeeper repository to track the
sources of competitors. Then he refused to sell the client to anyone who
was even working on competing software.

And one day, a break point was reached, when Andrew Tridgell was making
good progress towards a clean-room reverse engineering effort of the
bitkeeper client protocol. Andrew wasn't doing anything which went
against the software licence, but he was working for the same group that
Linus was working for, OSDL. McVoy announced that he was no longer
making available the client for free under any circumstances, because of
Tridge's work. After initially siding with McVoy on the issue and
accusing Tridgell of screwing people over, Linus abandoned Bitkeeper and
wrote the initial version of git.


In this context, what Hub is getting at is that if a free software
project becomes beholden to a proprietary tool (be it an IDE, a
debugger, a compiler or a source control system), it's an unhealthy
situation in the long term. There are substantial risks involved.

Cheers,
Dave.

-- 
Dave Neary
GNOME Foundation member
dneary gnome org