I’ve been meaning to mention this for a while. Apparently if you use proprietary software at work, you shouldn’t be working on open source competition to it in your spare time. At least, that’s the message from Larry McVoy, creator of the BitKeeper source control software, to Bryan O’Sullivan, a developer working on the Mercurial source control system. You might remember BitKeeper as the source control system that Linux used to use. Leaving aside all issues of employment law and what your company can and cannot make you do with your time, the big question I have is: how could an end user possibly move BitKeeper technology into Mercurial? I’m pretty sure that BK isn’t shipped with source (or else Tridge wouldn’t have had to reverse-engineer the protocol) so what possible IP threat was BK facing? Some Mercurial tools have the same commandline switches as BK–is that it? It feels all-too-much like someone was happy to ride the Linux wave while it was commoditizing other software fields, but who doesn’t like it when the same open source force turns its eye to his field.
