The Demise of the Gratis BitKeeper Licensing
Note about Relevance
As of 2018, this site has become mostly irrelevant.
Written at: 12-April-2005
Updated at: 13-July-2016
13-July-2016: Recent Note: BitKeeper was made open source
BitKeeper was recently made open source and its source code is available on bitkeeper.org under the Apache 2.0 License. This twist of events may invalidate some of what was said here. However, note that following the demise of the gratis BitKeeper licence, several open source distributed version control systems were developed, including Git that became very popular. So this move may be too little to save BitKeeper - and too late.
BitMover, BitKeeper's parent company, announced that it will discontinue the gratis version of BitKeeper intended for development of Open Source Software. The implications of this are laid out in this KernelTrap editorial. A NewsForge article interviews the parties involved in this decision and what they think.
As a result, the Subversion developers issued a statement in which they say that Subversion is not a suitable alternative to BitKeeper for the distributed development-model used by the kernel developers, and that Subversion advocates should not attempt to convince people to use it instead of the no-longer-available BitKeeper.
One can also refer to this thread in KernelTrap about "Life after BitKeeper".
The implication of all of this is that developers of open source software who desire to use BitKeeper to maintain their codebase, will require getting a commercial license proper from BitMover (possibly for no charge). Linus Torvalds, the chief developer of the Linux kernel, has announced that he will not take this option, and instead that he is seeking an alternative to BitKeeper for maintaining the Linux kernel.
These announcements invalidate a large part of what was said about BitKeeper and its licensing terms, on this site and elsewhere. The content of the pages here will remain, but a notice will be added to indicate that it may no longer be relevant.
Coverage of This Story
- KernelTrap editorial about the discontinuation of the gratis BitKeeper
- Slashdot: No More BitKeeper Linux.
- Slashdot: Linus Drops BitKeeper
- Slashdot: BitKeeper Love Triangle: McVoy, Linus and Tridge
- NewsForge: BitKeeper and Linux: The end of the road?
- Slashdot Poll: If I were Linus, I would replace BitKeeper with....
- LWN's coverage of the story (with comments).
- OSNews.com - No More Free BitKeeper. (with comments).
- The Register - Torvalds knifes Tridgell - a piece about criticism that Linus Torvalds voiced against Andrew Tridgell, who was accused by BitMover for attempting to reverse engineer the BitKeeper protocols. (which in turn caused the dis-continuation of the gratis BitKeeper licensing).
- The Register - 'Cool it, Linus' - Bruce Perens - Bruce Perens, the well-known open-source leader comes to the defence of Andrew Tridgell.
- NewsForge - BitKeeper Bon-voyage is a Happy Ending - an opinionated essay by Richard M. Stallman about BitKeeper and its history. Here's the coverage on Slashdot.
- "Linus Torvalds' BitKeeper blunder" - an InfoWorld coverage of the case. Also see the discussion of the article on LWN.
- LWN - How Tridge Reverse Engineered BitKeeper - a feature along with some discussion.
- LWN - A Setback for Linux (Forbes) - an LWN coverage of the article by Daniel Lyons that predicts bad news to the Kernel development as a result of the BitKeeper demise.
- Linux Dispute Boils over to MySQL, Other Projects - an article in ComputerWorld about how other Open Source projects which use BitKeeper need to adapt to its discontinuation. Also see a coverage in LWN.
