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Comment by dsr_

10 years ago

For people who don't know the history -- McVoy offered free bitkeeper licenses to various open source projects, and the Linux kernel switched to it.

After Andrew Tridgell (SAMBA, among other projects) reverse-engineered the bitkeeper protocol [1] in order to create his own client, the license was rescinded for everyone.

As a result, Linus wrote git.

[1] https://lwn.net/Articles/132938/

44 comments

dsr_

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jordigh  10 years ago

> As a result, Linus wrote git.

And mpm wrote hg, never forget:

http://lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0504.2/0670.html

http://lwn.net/Articles/151624/

  • drostie  10 years ago

    It's astonishing to me that Git has won out given how much easier it's been for me to explain Hg to other people than to explain Git. To this day, in our SVN workflow at my company, nontechnical people who have merely seen a Hg diagram on a whiteboard by my desk immediately grasped the idea and the lingo, and ask me questions like "hey, can you branch the code to commit those changes and push them to the testing server? This thing's really cool and we don't mind playing with the alpha version, but we might scrap it all later."

    • anarazel  10 years ago

      Maybe I'm a too long time user of git, but I really fail to see why git as of the last 5 years is any harder to explain than hg. Personally I think the branching in hg is pretty much broken; alone the fact that it's pretty much impossible to get rid of branches is horrible.

      11 replies →

    • dsp1234  10 years ago

      "hey, can you branch the code to commit those changes and push them to the testing server? This thing's really cool and we don't mind playing with the alpha version, but we might scrap it all later."

      Are they talking about hg or git here. Because that flow in git is:

        git branch
  git checkout
  git commit
  git push

      The only thing that git adds to that workflow is that creating a new branch doesn't immediately move you onto it (also that most would use checkout -b to do both). And it's not immediately obvious that a non-technical user would need to know about that in order to get the above point across.

      14 replies →

ryao  10 years ago

From what I read, he connected to a bit keeper repository via telnet on port 5000, executed the help command and then used that information to write an incomplete client. That does not sound like reverse engineering to me.

gadders  10 years ago

As I remember it, it was a bit of a douche move by Tridgell, driven by a Stallman-like free software ideology.