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From: | Aaron Bentley |
Subject: | Re: [Gnu-arch-users] Conflicts in .arch-ids |
Date: | Tue, 17 Aug 2004 13:33:11 -0400 |
User-agent: | Mozilla Thunderbird 0.5 (X11/20040309) |
James Blackwell wrote:
Catalin Marinas:A good start would be a public Linux mainline BK->arch gateway (one way) but this probably cannot be achieved with the free BK because of its license,BK's license prevents developers of other revision control systems from writing a BK->arch gateway without purchasing a license (about $2k IIRC). As such, Tom Lord, Robert Collins, Aaron Bentley and myself can not legally work on such a gateway unless a couple thousand dollars is forked over (per person).
It's a bit stronger than that. Even Alan Cox couldn't use BK, because Red Hat works on CVS.
What's more, the clause is rather ambigious, so its potentially possible that anybody that wrote a BK->Arch gateway could be considered as "working on arch".
One clean-room approach would be for an Archer to specify the API they needed, and for a BK-clean user to write a library conforming to that API.
The API would not, then, be Arch-specific, and in fact, could also be the basis for BK -> svn, BK -> darcs, and BK -> perforce gateways.
I'm not necessarily recommending this approach, but one of the cscvs maintainers could probably spec up a good API.
So what to do, what to do? Larry McVoy, speaking as the CEO of BitMovers Inc, has said that anybody that wants to perform this work can license a copy of bitkeeper. So I'll ask this... is there anybody that, if a licensed copy of bitkeeper were provided to them, has the time, the inclinationand the credentials to work on a BK->Arch gateway?
Not I. Aaron -- Aaron Bentley Director of Technology Panometrics, Inc.
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