Speak today, repent at leisure

Sam Varghese
Wednesday, 17 January 2007 04:27

Opinion and Analysis

Microsoft Office 365

 People are prone to put Stallman and Torvalds in opposing camps. The former is seen as the fundamentalist with an agenda, the latter as a pragmatic engineer who is only interested in good technology. However, some decisions taken by Torvalds in the past, decisions which Stallman criticised for short-term thinking, have proven to be somewhat shortsighted.

Take the case of version control. In 2002, Torvalds decided to start using the BitKeeper source code management system for developing Linux. At that time, there was a commercial version and a free non-commercial version. The free version required that all change logs be sent to a world-readable server controlled by BitMover, the company that develops BitKeeper. Both versions were proprietary, no source provided. Torvalds used the free version and several other developers followed suit.

In 2005, BitMover owner Larry McVoy decided to stop the free version of BitKeeper, claiming that he was doing so because a well-known Australian developer, Andrew Tridgell, had reverse-engineered the protocols used in BitKeeper. These claims were later called into question by Tridgell, again one of those super-developers like Cox, when he demonstrated that he had indulged in no skullduggery to find out how BitKeeper worked; he had just initiated an ordinary telnet session and found out what he needed to know. He released the code for his project, called SourcePuller, soon thereafter.

Stallman was a fierce opponent of the use of BitKeeper right from the word go. In 2002, he said: "The use of Bitkeeper for the Linux sources has a grave effect on the free software community, because anyone who wants to closely track patches to Linux can only do it by installing that non-free program." And he cautioned: "Value your freedom, or you will lose it, teaches history. "Don't bother us with politics," respond those who don't want to learn."

In a comment piece in 2005, when McVoy announced the decison to stop providing the free version of BitKeeper, Stallman said: "For the first time in my life, I want to thank Larry McVoy. He recently eliminated a major weakness of the free software community, by announcing the end of his campaign to entice free software projects to use and promote his non-free software. Soon, Linux development will no longer use this program, and no longer spread the message that non-free software is a good thing if it's convenient."

He ended by saying: "We should not forget the lesson we have learned from it: Non-free programs are dangerous to you and to your community. Don't let them get a place in your life."