Re: Petition Against Official Endorsement of BitKeeper by Linux Maintainers

["Jeff V. Merkey" <jmerkey@vger.timpanogas.org>]

All hail the non-profit nazis from Ohio State.  It's none of your 
f_cking business what we use to develop software.  I use a hardware
American Arium logic analyzer and a proprietary Linux kernel 
debugger.  Should people be boycotted when they use hardware 
analyzers to debug hardware and software with Linux.  

It's pretty clear that the alumni of Ohio State University have the
finest sinsemilla weed around, and have been smoking it.  I guess
you guys will decide who we get to sleep with next, marry, and 
which type of cereal we get to eat. 

The motto behind open source was "freedom of choice".  So much for
progress.  Let's bring back slavery while we are at at.  I'll move 
back to the Indian reservation in New Mexico where I grew up since 
freedom is going away.

How about sending me some of the killer weed you guys have been smoking.
You can pass the crack pipe around while you're at it.

:-)

Jeff


On Tue, Mar 05, 2002 at 04:52:34PM -0500, The Open Source Club at The Ohio State University wrote:
> Petition Against Official Endorsement of BitKeeper by Linux Maintainers
> 
> We, the undersigned members and officers of the Open Source Club at
> the Ohio State University, are unhappy with the advocacy of the
> proprietary[1] BitKeeper software for use in maintaining the Linux
> kernel.  The Linux kernel is an important symbol of Open Source and
> Free Software for many people, and a project in which many thousands
> have participated in active development.  It is fine if some kernel
> developers choose to use BitKeeper on their own machines, but
> officially endorsing proprietary software as the means of working on
> the kernel is a large step backwards for Linux, and for the Open
> Source and Free Software communities.
> 
> If the core Linux maintainers begin to advocate using BitKeeper, then
> there will be strong pressure on these peripheral developers to use
> BitKeeper too, since it would likely be easier than browsing the
> web-exported changelogs or fetching the latest diff from kernel.org.
> 
> Using a closed-source, proprietary source control system for the
> kernel is even worse than using other forms of proprietary software
> such as source code analysis systems, because the revision control
> metadata (version numbers, branches, changelog comments, etc.), would
> be stored in a format defined by the proprietary software.  This
> metadata is really a part of Linux, because people will want to use it
> when talking about the kernel.  Those who can't[2] or don't want to
> use BitKeeper are left out in the cold.  One of the most important
> parts of Open Source and Free Software is that we, the community, are
> in control.  But by using and advocating BitKeeper, we would lose part
> of that control.
> 
> In summary, please do not advocate BitKeeper for use by the general
> community.  The Linux development process seems to have worked up till
> now, and we can wait a little longer until Arch[3] or Subversion[4]
> are completed.  Moreover, full-featured, completely functional free 
> versioning sytems are currently available, such as PRCS[5] and CVS[6].
> We respect the kernel maintainer's freedom to use proprietary software 
> for their own purposes.  And we ask the kernel maintainers to respect 
> the community's freedom from entrapment by proprietary software.
> 
> -- The Open Source Club at The Ohio State University
> Signed by:
> Michael Benedict <zosima@zosima.org>
> Colin Walters <walters@debian.org>
> Matt Curtin <cmcurtin@interhack.net>
> Martin Jansche <jansche@ling.ohio-state.edu>
> Balbir Thomas <thomas.1037@osu.edu>
> Nicholas Hurley <hurley@cis.ohio-state.edu>
> Ryan McCormack <mccormac@cis.ohio-state.edu>
> Shaun Rowland <rowland@cis.ohio-state.edu>
> 
> [1] http://www.mit.edu/afs/athena/user/x/i/xiphmont/Public/critique.html
> [2] Perhaps they aren't connected to the internet regularly enough,
>     for instance.
> [3] http://www.regexps.com/#arch
> [4] http://subversion.tigris.org
> [5] http://prcs.sourceforge.net
> [6] http://www.cvshome.org
> 
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