Hubert: Maybe he changed the licence because the KDE guys were migrating to BK and he wanted to shaft them.
Honestly though, I don’t know why anyone is surprised. This has been in the pipelines for ages. Bitmover is actively hostile to any free software developer that wants to know what’s going on under the hood.
Linus has a point – he chose BK, and Linux is his baby. That would be fine, if people could obtain copies of BK to reverse engineer the protocol (Larry apparently refuses to even sell copies to competitors or people he considers hostile to him).
The major problem Larry McVoy has is that he doesn’t want to be exposed to the market, or to the way free software works. He criticises people for trying to take away his revenue stream. The people working on reverse engineering BK are not trying to take away your revenue stream, Larry, any more than the people working on Samba are trying to take away Microsoft’s. They’re just trying to get at free information, without paying you for the privilege.
I saw one comment saying that if people further down the chain imported the sources into arch and started using it for kernel development, it would slowly creep up the tree. Having 2 version control systems for 1 project is like having 2 feet for 1 shoe. It doesn’t work. The value in a version control system is to easily pull information from, and push information to, other people. Until there is an arch to bitkeeper gateway, where people can commit from arch clients into a bk repository, that isn’t happening with the kernel.
