KEEPING THE CODE

Dear Linux Magazine Reader,

If you were tuned to the blogs recently, you may have noticed the immortals of open source throwing lightening bolts at each other in a very public feud. Of course, everyone

suspected something was brewing when BitMover CEO Larry McVoy suddenly revoked the special arrangement he’d made to provide BitKeeper code management software for the Linux developers. I won’t launch into a long play by play, but suffice it to say, not long after the announcement, it emerged that Samba author Andrew Tridgell had developed an open BitKeeper-compatible client. This may seem entirely routine. Isn’t that what people like Andrew Tridgell do – build open source tools that challenge the power and privilege of commercial systems? But the story was a bit more complicated. And the swift response from Linus was even more complicated.