This Space for Rent

Bitmover can bite me.

Several years ago, I worked for the version control company Bitmover (good product, not quite so good of a company) and got seduced into using their product bitkeeper. Bitkeeper was (and, presumably, still is) a pretty good version control system, but after I leapt, shrieking, from the company and went elsewhere to work, the licensing on the free version of the product tightened up to the point where I refused to update my copies of the code. (I stuck with the version that was released with a license that allowed me to use it without maintainence fees, as long as I sent transaction logs down to their transaction log server in california. It wasn't a bad license, because I didn't particularly care if people saw my "oh, I screwed this fix up for " comments, and it had what appeared to be no sunset, so bitmover couldn't yank the license and leave me -- and my approximately 40 repositories of various open source software projects, dns databases, and web page trees -- in the lurch. It did have the "you sue us, we yank your license" clause, which seemed reasonable, since I had no intention of ever suing bitmover.)

Fast forward a few years. One of the Linux core team, who didn't like the whole idea of Linux depending on a proprietary version control system, reverse engineered the wire formats and wrote some bk extraction scripts. And, when confronted, he -- reasonably, as it turned out -- refused to stop working on those scripts. At which point bitmover did the exploding head dance and said "fine, we're pulling the plug on all the free versions, so there!"

"All the free versions" includes, if the nasty little form letter I just got in the mail, the old versions that just did openlogging (and which had the spiffy little "180 days after the openlogging servers die, the source goes gpl." Not that this would do any good, because it would take legal action to force the gplisation of the source, and that would bring up section 4.4, paragraph 3, which is the "sue us, we yank your license" clause mentioned in the previous paragraph.)

So, in the next 10 days I get to do the exciting job of finding a free version control system (preferably one that doesn't carry around a relational database, and one that doesn't do a cvs-style client/server arrangement where if your server dies, so does all of your revision history) that's got a license that doesn't allow the owner of said license to say "I'm taking my toys and going home!" (the jury is still out on whether the GPL forbids this sort of statement; I remember the FSF having hissy fits when people were linking GPLed code with libraries they didn't personally approve of.)

When I was still on speaking terms with bitmover (that stopped about 4 paragraphs ago), I asked -- begged, even -- if I could get a waiver from the new more restrictive licenses so I could track the newer versions of the software. I never got a reply. And now I get to export approximately 2 million lines of code. It doesn't make me feel better that I've already written code to convert from one version control system to another.

How do you say "this sucks!" in English? Oh, yeah, "this sucks!"