BitKeeper license critic

[MJ Ray]

Joerg Schilling <schilling at fokus.gmd.de> wrote:
> Subscribe to opengroup.org to get free access to the standards....

I read this and I thought: How is paying US$2500 free access to the
standards?

Digging (very) deep in that site, it appears that I may not have to pay now,
but they "reserve the right to charge for HTML/PDF versions of its
publications in the future".  Only a fool would agree to pay an unspecified
amount at an unspecified future date.

> POSIX contains SCCS but does not contain VCS.

Surely that is POSIX's flaw?

>>> Also the RCS repository file format is prone to faults.
>>How so?
> No checksum and a backward delta.

Checksums would be a slight problem, yes.  Surely the backward delta is just
the generated patch applied in reverse?

> In former times, this caused problems with flaky HW in out time this
> causes problems with flaky the Linux NFS implementation....

Sorry, I don't buy this.  OS bugs aren't the application's concern.  I mean,
memory sometimes fails: should the application do its own parity checking
too?  I can see why distributed repositories etc are good for reliability,
but not trusting the platform is the road to madness.

-- 
MJR ,----------------------------------------------------
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