BitKeeper licence critic

[Simo Sorce]

On Mon, 2002-03-18 at 09:41, Joerg Schilling wrote:
> >From jeroen at dekkers.cx Sun Mar 17 14:13:56 2002

You are getting a bit too far IMO Joerg.
I respect you and also use your cdrecord (once every 6 months but still
use it), but I have to partly disagree with most of your statemens
lately.
First of all I think cdrecord is a great software but you are a little
too optimistic in thinking _most_ people use it.
I know people that use it but not so much, I still know a lot of people
that use linux and do not have a burner or prefer some windows based
proprietary program for burning, however I'm not there to judge how used
your program is, as it is a nonsense as we do not have any reliable
statistical analisys on that, so please stop with this "mine is longer
than yours stupid joke".

> Let me give a simple example to you that your assumption makes no sense in the 
> real world:
> 
> There is a nasty bug in SunPRO make. If I would be able to fix it myself
> (I really am because it is easy to get Sun's sources) this would not help.
> It would force me to tell all users of my makefiles that they need to 
> use my fix what many of them probably don't like (the same would happen
> with GNU make). 
> 
> You see that while  can introduce workarounds in my makefile system, it makes
> no sense to fix the program myself.

Sorry you are wrong:
- first: it does not make sense to even use a proprietary program but
anyone is free to think the way she likes, you like free (as in beer)
programs? ok, but do not take as grant that others here agree with you,
most there will disagree with you as we like freedom, not free beer.

- second: in large free software projects patches from outher people are
very welcome, I do not know your experiences, but you are wrong in
thinking your personal development model is the one widely adopted in
the rest of the free software world. In the main project I'm involved
with (samba) patches are very welcome and we use and apply many many
patches from contributors, plus we use gnu make and we do support many
many platfroms (free and non-free), probably more than you do with
cdrecord (even some non-posix platforms ports have been done and from
people that made it on their own!)

> >They don't complain about GNU make.
> 
> Because they only use a small fractioction of what makes sense to do with
> make.

They use what they need! fullstop!

> >You don't understand that you can't force volunteers to do
> >something. If you want to see something, you've to do it yourself.
> 
> You don't understand that it does not make sense to to it yourself because
> the maintainers will not use your patches!

You ARE wrong!
I personally applied many patches to samba from others!

> I started to do this once with Linux and the /dev/sg* driver and I failed
> miserably because Alan Cox decided not to use my enhanced driver.

Probably because it was poorely coded from Alan point of view, they are
very selective and you took the worst project on the world (from this
point of view) to make patches against.

> >Look at glibc. It's portable, it uses GNU make and it works correctly.
> 
> The person was talking about the way to create dependency files and I can tell
> you that the only method that works reliable in a multi platform environment
> is the method used in the schily makefile system and the method promoted
> by the FSF people is deprecated because it will result in overwritten
> files in a multi-platform environment. Maybe if the GCC people learn to 
> understand how to do it correctly inside GCC and there is no more old GCC
> outside I may switch to a better method for dependencies.

hmm I think you are wrong again here, my experience with samba tell me
so. We use GNU make and I see no multi platform problems (take a look to
http://build.samba.org to see how many different platfroms works ok!
They are not all the platforms samba runs on, but only the platforms we
have currently available in the build farm)

> 
> >> While GNU make does make the Makefile before using it (e.g. by retrieving
> >> it from SCCS) it does not make make files to be included even if there is=
> > a=20
> >> rule.
> 
> >And nobody with enough interest in GNU make needs this, so GNU make
> >doesn't do it.
> 
> ???

He mean that your inclusion features are not included in GNU make
because nobody need them, and you do not want to contribute code to make
GNU make better.
I do not want to say that GNU make is very good or that you should not
use smake, if you are ok with smake I'm too, it's your choice, you are
the developer, but generally in free software world, if you want to see
a feature added to a program (GNU make) you either make a patch your
self or contact the mainteiner and convince him it is a needed feature
so that he can add it by itself. If you do not take either ways, please
at least do not shout on other people work, you already said "code do
not speak" (about the Hurd), I would like to say the same to you.

> >Sorry, I don't have much knowledge about companies and software who
> >only like to restric me. Solaris might be free beer then, who cares.
> 
> Well the authors of GDB restrict me because it is the only debugger available 
> on Linux and because I cannot do the things I expect a debugger to do.

You have a vrey strange idea of restriction and freedom IMO !

Work with people to improve GDB! If you do not care, please do not
bother us telling to use proprietary debbugers, we will not do so!


regards,
Simo.


-- 
Simo Sorce
----------
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