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SubjectRe: Linus is on a powertrip..
Date
: Will bitkeeper be a problem for companies like Red Hat?  The proposed
: licensing terms seem to suffer from the same problem Red Hat sees with
: Qt, which they give as their reason for not including KDE. I'm not sure
: it would be a good idea for a tool to become an essential part of kernel
: development if the current number one Linux distribution will not include
: it.

I'll try and work seomthing out with RedHat. They've already indicated
that they would happily include it on their commercial CD which comes
with their regular CD. Furthermore, it will always be free to people
doing free software as well as small shops (places with less than $1M
US annual gross revenues).

I can't afford to make it completely free, it's costing me lots of money
to do the development. I've already spent more than Cyclic makes in a
year supporting CVS so the old "you can make money through support tune"
doesn't play well with me.

If the Linux community can't handle dealing with partially free software,
then they are welcome to write completely free software to do the
same job. Given that CVS has been widely used for almost 10 years and
it still basically sucks suggest that maybe the free software community
isn't going to rise to the occasion. Source management is not a "sexy"
area unlike stuff like Gnome et al. Problems in the non-sexy space
either don't get solved or get solved by commercial shops. If you want
access good products in that space, you'll have to learn how to coexist
with semi-commercial products.

The fanaticism that surrounds free software is a problem, in my opinion.
It is the next big problem that faces the community. It forces people to
choose between completely free or completely non-free. As with almost
everything, the end point is not the right place to be, the midpoint
is a better answer. The mid point for this discussion is some sort of
compromise that lets the free software community get the software and lets
the business community buy the software. Both sides benefit: the free
software guys get stuff early and often and don't have to pay for it.
The business guys get the benefit of the testing and bug reporting
the free software guys do and are willing to pay for tested software.
That money turns around and pays for more development, which goes back
to the free software people once again. And around and around you go.

The next predictive paper that I will write will be on this subject.
The last time I saw a problem this clearly was in '92 when I wrote the
freeos paper (http://www.bitmover.com/lm/papers/freeos.ps).

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