BitKeeper license critic

[Joerg Schilling]

>From: MJ Ray <markj at cloaked.freeserve.co.uk>

>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?

If you like to pay, I believe you are welcome.

But please do not state that you _need_ to pay.

>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.

Please not not start to spread your assumptions, stay with the truth.

They will most likely start to charge for the PDF files but HTML will stay
free (as the draft versions do). As soon as ECMA includes POSIX-1.2001, there 
will be a second source for free access.

But your behaviour looks like you did not yet understand that people sometimes
need to earn money in order to be able to pay for their life.

It yould be nice if I could go to my baker and ask him for free bread just
bacause he could use my CD recording program for free.

It becomes more and more disappointing to see how users of free software 
behave. In case of cdrecord it is really disappointing to see my workload 
constanly increasing because dumb and lazy people send me mail and nobody
is willing to contribute to the project. If users continue to behave this
way, many real free software authors will stop working on free software.


>> POSIX contains SCCS but does not contain VCS.

>Surely that is POSIX's flaw?

Why? SCCS uses the better file format, there is no reason to also 
put CVS into the standard. The CPIO archive format also has been finally 
removed in favor of TAR because it is not extensible.

...
>> 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.

It seems that you never lost a file (or parts of it) because of the flaky
Linux NFS implementation. I am not shure if this has been fixed now but
I am still in fear to edit files on Linux if they are NFS mounted.



Jörg

 EMail:joerg at schily.isdn.cs.tu-berlin.de (home) Jörg Schilling D-13353 Berlin
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