Petition Against Official Endorsement of BitKeeper by Linux Maintainers We, the undersigned members and officers of the Open Source Club at the Ohio State University, are unhappy with the advocacy of the proprietary[1] BitKeeper software for use in maintaining the Linux kernel. The Linux kernel is an important symbol of Open Source and Free Software for many people, and a project in which many thousands have participated in active development. It is fine if some kernel developers choose to use BitKeeper on their own machines, but officially endorsing proprietary software as the means of working on the kernel is a large step backwards for Linux, and for the Open Source and Free Software communities.
If the core Linux maintainers begin to advocate using BitKeeper, then there will be strong pressure on these peripheral developers to use BitKeeper too, since it would likely be easier than browsing the web-exported changelogs or fetching the latest diff from kernel.org. Using a closed-source, proprietary source control system for the kernel is even worse than using other forms of proprietary software such as source code analysis systems, because the revision control metadata (version numbers, branches, changelog comments, etc.), would be stored in a format defined by the proprietary software. This metadata is really a part of Linux, because people will want to use it when talking about the kernel. Those who can't[2] or don't want to use BitKeeper are left out in the cold. One of the most important parts of Open Source and Free Software is that we, the community, are in control. But by using and advocating BitKeeper, we would lose part of that control. In summary, please do not advocate BitKeeper for use by the general community. The Linux development process seems to have worked up till now, and we can wait a little longer until Arch[3] or Subversion[4] are completed. Moreover, full-featured, completely functional free versioning sytems are currently available, such as PRCS[5] and CVS[6]. We respect the kernel maintainer's freedom to use proprietary software for their own purposes. And we ask the kernel maintainers to respect the community's freedom from entrapment by proprietary software. -- The Open Source Club at The Ohio State University Signed by: Michael Benedict <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Colin Walters <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Matt Curtin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Martin Jansche <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Balbir Thomas <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Nicholas Hurley <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Ryan McCormack <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Shaun Rowland <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> [1] http://www.mit.edu/afs/athena/user/x/i/xiphmont/Public/critique.html [2] Perhaps they aren't connected to the internet regularly enough, for instance. [3] http://www.regexps.com/#arch [4] http://subversion.tigris.org [5] http://prcs.sourceforge.net [6] http://www.cvshome.org - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/ _______________________________________________ Linux-users mailing list - http://linux-sxs.org/mailman/listinfo/linux-users Subscribe/Unsubscribe info, Archives,and Digests are located at the above URL.