Ayn Rand said in "Atlas Shrugged" that any man must make a choice
between upholding freedom, life and not defaulting on logic or reason,
or between succumbing to Mysticism and irrationality. Similarly in the
free software world one must make a choice between holding on to their
free software ideals, or simply becoming as bad as Microsoft or worse. (in
this regard)
I used to think of me as an "in for free beer" kind of guy. Use it,
whether it is free or not. Code. Distribute. Be happy. I still feel no
guilt feelings or remorse for using proprietary software. But I also
know there should be a choice between free software and proprietary
software, and that the free alternative should be up to par if not
better than the proprietary one.
We all agree that CVS and Perforce are OK as far as source control
management systems are concerned. We all agree that ClearCase is very
powerful but has become very bloated, and practically Consultingware.
BitKeeper is superb. I worked with it, and it is cutting edge software,
very stable, and very well-done. It is not free software, however, and
is becoming less and less so as time goes by.
Don't get me wrong - I like Larry, and wish him the best of luck in selling
BitKeeper to commercial entities. But I have three problems with him:
1. He is paranoid and has complete distrust of his potential users out there.
2. He routinely blames others for his own problems.
3. He has an idea fix that most free software developers would agree to use
his software despite the fact that it is not free. (something that could never
deviate enough from the fact).
Luckily for us there are at least three alternatives out there that are better
than CVS (albeit doubtely not as good as BitKeeper):
1. Aegis - Aegis was created by Peter Miller, a superb UNIX hacker and computer
scientist, and intended to be the ultimate SCM tool out there. Aegis is already
mature and usable, but it is possible that BitKeeper is still better in some
regards. Peter Miller has been very quite about getting contributions to Aegis, and
seems to realize that the World would keep revolving without it (which is
true).
2. Subversion - a SCM tool that aimed to be primarily a "better CVS" and not
too much more. Under very active development, and in beta stage now.
3. Arch - an SCM package by Tom Lord that is already usable. Lord has recently
requested donations so he can keep working on Arch on his free time. My
suggestion to him is to not be so desperate: work on Arch for fun, and use
"the Cathedral and the Bazaar" concepts to get people involved in it.
There isn't something inherently wrong with Source-control management systems
that would make them impossible to be developed as open source. But we need
money to hire competent companies to do the work for us, if we wish to make
the situation quicker. That's why I need $20 million dollars. Source Control
needs cost milliards of dollars each year, and $20 million is a drop in the
ocean. I am not a lawyer so I'll need someone else to maintain it.
This money would be dedicated to continuing development of those products,
hopefully bringing them more up to par with BitKeeper, which even I decided
that I can no longer use.
What hosting services can do to help, is not to pre-assume developers
want CVS or only CVS hosting. By all means a public Arch, Aegis or Subverion
repository will go along way in accepting them.
A final note: the so-called "1.0" of SCM's is at infinity. There will always
be the 2.0 of SCMs, as well as the 3.0 etc. Knuth is not God because God
has already released TeX 4.0 and is hard at work on version 5. As I noted
once, the number of items on a project's to-do list always grows or remains
constant. (and some of the good Hackers-IL people could find ways to prove it
from the second law of thermodynamics.)
Best regards,
Shlomi Fish
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Shlomi Fish [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Home Page: http://t2.technion.ac.il/~shlomif/
Home E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
"Let's suppose you have a table with 2^n cups..."
"Wait a second - is n a natural number?"
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