BitKeeper: No holds barred open source infighting

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Ingrid Marson ZDNet.co.uk

Published: 20 Apr 2005 17:40 BST

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For his part, Tridgell claims he was merely writing a tool that was interoperable with BitKeeper. He claims he did not use BitKeeper when developing his tool and was therefore not subject to the conditions in its licence.

The furious wrangling over who, if anyone, is in the right has split the open source community down the middle. Jeremy Allison, the co-founder of Samba, claims that Tridgell was merely reverse-engineering Bitkeeper to ensure interoperability, which is a legitimate practice.

"I think Linus is mistaken to criticise Andrew, as what Andrew did was equivalent to the techniques we use in Samba, and obviously I have a strong feeling that what we do is standard engineering practice, and is done by software engineers worldwide, whether working for proprietary companies or Open Source companies " says Allison. "I'm hoping after Linus' temper cools down he'll be able to understand he is wrong in this judgement on Andrew."

In another posting on the Real World Technologies forum Torvalds' countered that there is no similarity between Tridgell's actions around Bitkeeper and the reverse-engineering used in Samba. "OpenOffice and Samba are constructive projects that actually do something useful, and are technically advanced quite regardless of the fact that they can interoperate with the competition," said Torvalds.

The Linux creator argued that Tridgell's actions were irresponsible as they directly resulted in BitMover canning its free version of Bitkeeper. "Now, I'm dealing with the fall-out, and I'll write my own kernel source tracking tool because I can't use the best any more," says Torvalds.

Gary Barnett, a research director at analyst firm Ovum, says he thinks Torvalds should be praised for setting a high standard regarding the protection of intellectual property.

"I think that simple straightforward reverse engineering does find itself on the borderline between the creation of a new application and straightforward copying. I don't know about the extent of the reverse engineering in this case to make a call," says Barnett. "Certainly Linus sets a very, very high standard and is very, very sensitive to the intellectual-property issues that surround this and rightly so."

It is important to protect intellectual property to allow innovation to happen, according to Eddie Bleasdale, the director of open source consultancy Netproject.

" I agree with what Linus is doing. If someone has put intellectual effort into developing anything then their copyright should be protected," says Bleasdale. "If someone then wants to produce a competing product then they should do so from first principles. If the intellectual effort spent designing, developing and bringing a product to market is not protected then progress will stop."

But some in the open source community, such as Debian developer Wookey, do not blame either Torvalds or Tridgell, but instead lay the blame squarely at the feet of BitMover's McVoy.

"You can understand the motivations of everyone involved — Linus is a pragmatist who just wanted an easier life, Larry McVoy wanted to promote BitMover and Bitkeeper, and Tridge wanted to find out how things worked," says Wookey. "All of that is fair enough, but ultimately I think Larry is the one who comes out worst from this, with his repeated licence changes and an absolute desire to retain control, which would be fair enough except that he also presents himself as a martyr who was only trying to help."

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