Feature: No More Free BitKeeper

Feature: No More Free BitKeeper: "What Went Wrong
Discussing what led to this decision, Larry explained, 'this is really an open source community problem and I have to say that the open source community couldn't have failed more than they have.' He pointed out that as a long-time open source fanatic and the CEO of BitMover, 'we represent as open-source friendly a commercial organization as you are *ever* going to see', cautioning that the events that have caused BitMover to phase out its free product could also result in other companies never even bothering to make products available on Linux. 'back at Sun they had a saying 'it's the apps, stupid'. Which meant that all the 'my OS is better than your OS' rhetoric was nothing compared to having more applications on your platform than the other guy's platform. That's true for Linux as well and the point is that no company is going to port their applications to a platform who's stated goal and track record is to reverse engineer everything they find useful. At some point the open source world needs to either decide they'll tolerate commercial software and respect the fact that commercial companies are entitled to make money off their efforts or step up and take on the challenge of providing open source versions of *every* application.'

He continued, 'our position is that we don't think we have any chance of changing how the 'open source community' behaves. Unlike the Marine corp, the open source community is more than willing to ignore their bad apples as 'not my problem' (the Marine corp punishes the group for the behavior of the bad apples, pretty soon there are no bad apples). Maybe that will get fixed some day but until then we have to do what makes sense for our business and letting the open source guys put us out of business doesn't make sense.'"