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Date: Fri, 14 Feb 2003 07:30:39 -0800
From: Larry McVoy <lm@bitmover.com>
To: Alan Cox <alan@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk>
Cc: David Lang <david.lang@digitalinsight.com>,
       "Matthew D. Pitts" <mpitts@suite224.net>,
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Subject: Re: openbkweb-0.0
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On Fri, Feb 14, 2003 at 02:41:41PM +0000, Alan Cox wrote:
> On Fri, 2003-02-14 at 06:30, David Lang wrote:
> > Guys, Larry isn't saying that you are not allowed to BUY a copy of
> > bitkeeper and reeverse engineer it, he is saying that you are not allowed
> > to get the FREE copy of bitkeeper and reverse engineer it.
> 
> What he says about this is not worth a sheeps fart. Most of the world 
> allows reverse engineering for compatibility, full stop. Often not for
> cloning, so writing bk extracting tools is very different to cloning BK

First of all, we've carefully maintained SCCS compat to the extent that 
these tools aren't needed.  Thanks very much for acknowledging that it 
was nice of us to do so, Alan.

Second of all, all of those reverse engineering clauses are dependent on
you having a legal copy of the software, full stop.  You can't get a 
legal copy if what you want to do, now or in the future, is to reverse
engineer the software.  

Third of all, you could be right, I could be wrong, and I'm still right.
We give the software away for *free*.  We *own* it.  If it turns out that
people want to behave like little children and not play nice, no problem,
we'll promptly fork the tree and you are stuck with whatever version you
had at the point you decided to not play nice.  

I'm more than a little disgusted by this thread and the attitude of some
in it.  It's all well and good to whine about the BK license, but before
you do, how about quantifying the amount of good it has done for the 
kernel development process over the last year?  All sorts of people have
pointed out that things are going a lot better, perhaps you want to take
that into consideration before you decide to yank this particular chain.
-- 
---
Larry McVoy            	 lm at bitmover.com           http://www.bitmover.com/lm 
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