On 16-09-11 19:17, Thomas Beale wrote: > (Torvalds more or less still says that SVN is pretty hopeless, and in > some ways he is right, depending on what your requirements are)
Torvalds even said that he passionately hated CVS, which he had to use at Transmeta. I feel the need to explain why open source is important (this is not ideology), and the CVS/Bitkeeper/Git story is a good example to explain it. If you don want to read, just skip this message. The Linux kernel-development used Bitkeeper instead of CVS and for good reasons, but they also stopped using Bitkeeper for good reasons. The reason why they stopped using Bitkeeper and went to GIT is because the conditions for using Bitkeeper suddenly changed very radically on account of the opinion of a single person, the owner of the product, Larry McVoy. He accused Andrew Tridgell to have re-engineered the Bitkeeper protocol. McVoy started as penalty for this, asking money to the Linux development team. My opinion is that McVoy wanted a piece of the money-cake that goes around in Linux, and he tried blackmailing the project, and I think that the re-engineering story just was a pretext to do so. So Bitkeeper was good, but had the typical closed source disadvantages. This was unacceptable for the Linux-kernel development. So they started to create a new product, called GIT, which is very much alike Bitkeeper. The difference is, GIT is an open source product. Why would that be? It is not because of the money, IBM, RedHAT, SuSE are able to pay for a product. The main reason is, the Linux Kernel development must not be depending on a single person or company. That is too dangerous. You can call it ideology, but it is pure practical business way of thinking. I wouldn't call IBM a company which keeps ideological principles, than just one, and that is how to make the shareholders happy. Having an open source product as version system is the only way companies can work together and keep on trusting each other. Open Source is not just a funny feature of Linux, because of some ideologists want it this way. It is the only way why it can exist, and compete with closed source products, like from Apple or Microsoft or the many UNIX-vendors in the nineties. Ask yourself why Apache has half of the market-share. And why IIS, the product of Microsoft the number-one software vendor in the world, for over ten years cannot reach the half of its market-share. The main reason is not quality. I think Microsoft is able to write a good webserver. The main reason is because Apache is open source, and therefore public domain. No-one can require for funny demands to use it. Bert
