Over in the Register, Andrew Orlowski has a fascinating article entitled Torvalds knifes Tridgell about another bizarre outburst by Linus Torvalds. This time it’s all about BitKeeper, the source code repository system. “Torvalds uses the pay-for proprietary software to manage the Linux source code (obliging other kernel developers to follow suit), but last week its owner, Bitkeeper CEO Larry McVoy, yanked the license, pushing Torvalds to look for an alternative. He’s now going to write his own. For this inconvenience, he blames [Andrew] Tridgell”, the genius behind SAMBA (the technology which finally killed my old PC-NFS product).
And what was Tridgell’s crime? He wanted to reverse-engineer the BitKeeper protocols so that Linux developers could browse the repository metadata. This sounds innocuous enough – after all, BitKeeper’s own website says that “Read-only users (people browsing the source, tracking progress, doing builds, etc.) still need a license but there is no charge for that license.”, so it’s not a question of money. Clearly there is something big at stake – something so important that McVoy is prepared to forego the prestige of hosting the Linux kernel repositories. According to Andrew Orlowski, “McVoy was adamant: ‘sorry, we’re not in the business of helping you develop a competing product.'” So that’s it? The key intellectual property is in the protocols? That seems odd.
I had two reactions to this piece. First, why on earth is the acknowledged flagship product of the FOSS world relying on a proprietary, closed source repository – particularly one run by a guy who clearly has no sympathy with FOSS, nor any understanding of the related business models? I would (naïvely) have thought that BitKeeper would want to hang on to the data and proliferate clients like crazy. (A famous LBJ quotation comes to mind.) And second, what is it that makes BitKeeper so wonderful? Let’s check out their web site. Truth in advertising? You be the judge:
Hardware costs: BitKeeper does not have this problem [of scale] because of its distributed model…. This model means that the hardware costs can be spread over a set of inexpensive PCs rather than a $300,000 SMP machine. BitMover hosts the Linux kernel repositories for thousands of users on a single inexpensive PC.
Human costs: An administrator is the person who makes sure that the hardware and the software is working, the repositories are backed up, etc. The distributed nature of BitKeeper removes the need for such a person.
Wow. Thousands of users on a single PC. No administrators. How cool. No wonder Linus was impressed. [That’s sarcasm, in case you didn’t notice.] I think that in the long term we’ll see that Andrew Tridgell has done the FOSS community a service, by provoking Linus and Larry into falling out. Hopefully the community can create a better – and truly open source – repository. However I wouldn’t rely on Linus to create it – he doesn’t seem to believe in open source any more….