Post #4294714
2026-07-16 05:47 UTC
Replies (2)
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@abartlet@mastodon.nzoss.nz 2026-07-16 07:05
@mrkeen@mastodon.social @doctormo@floss.social As someone around at the time the Wikipedia page describes it reasonably fairly: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitKeeper?wprov=sfla1 Tridge broke the commercial lock in, Larry McVoy responded by pulling free access and Linus coded up something quickly to keep development possible. None of the AI developments are in any way similar, as I see them, unless maintainers resign rather than accept work from AI tools they would otherwise accept.
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@leeloo@c.im 2026-07-16 08:32
@mrkeen@mastodon.social @doctormo@floss.social Andrew Tridgell needed to use Bitkeeper to do his job. But the license prevented him from using the official client, so he wrote his own, just like he had previously done for Windows file sharing. But BitKeeper was much more anti-interoperability than Microsoft in their "Linux is a cancer and the GPL is a virus" years. The reason Andrew Tridgell was forced to use BitKeeper was that Linus Thorvalds had decided that it would be a great idea to lock kernel development into a proprietary system. The similarity here is the decision to ignore ethics and legality¹ as long as Linus feels the tool does the job. ¹) BitKeeper had a license forbidding developers like Andrew Tridgell from using it. AI is built on large scale copyright violation, and while people like Sam Altman are rich enough to pretend that copyright law has already been abolished, politicians haven't yet gotten around to do so.