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Show HN: BitKeeper – Enterprise-ready version control, now open-source

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Re: Show HN: BitKeeper – Enterprise-ready version control, now open-source

#141

Post by luckydude »

ashitlerferad wrote: post #139

Too late :)

You and a lot of other people say that. Sure, if we want to take over from Git, it's late. But Git has left us with an opening, the only way Git works for the masses is Github, Git itself is too complicated and people "lose" their data (they don't but Git makes it appear like they did).

I think people will play with BK and find out that it can work for everyone without something like Github (we still need it but it's a nice to have, not a requirement).

We'll see. When I was proposing BK the intertubes said it would never work. I'm a little skeptical of the nay sayers.

Re: Show HN: BitKeeper – Enterprise-ready version control, now open-source

#142

Post by ashitlerferad »

luckydude wrote: post #58
appleflaxen wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for providing this level of detail; it's interesting to see the considerations that went into your decision. How / why did you decide to use the Apache license rather than the GPL? (It seems like a viral license might protect you a little bit, if you want to prevent your competitors from forking and improving your code base and then using it to compete against you.)

We decided to go all in on open source. Given our history, anything but a "here ya go" license wasn't going to go over well. We're aware that someone could fork it and compete against us, good on them if they can. Making money in this space isn't easy and if they can do better than us we'll ask 'em for a job. We know the source base :) As to why that license, I think it was because LLVM or clang or both had recently…

GPL please!

Re: Show HN: BitKeeper – Enterprise-ready version control, now open-source

#143

Post by ryao »

nickpsecurity wrote: post #75
rbanffy wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the companies acted in self interest Sun, could, at least, make a profit building workstations and servers and licensing chips. It's actually very sad they don't build those SPARC desktops anymore.

I really doubt it. There's not enough demand to make them competitive in price-performance. The server chips have stayed badass but still niche market. There's even open-source, SPARC HW with reference boards for sell from Gaisler. That didn't take off. I liked the desktops but there's no money in them. Market always rejects it. So does FOSS despite it being the only open ISA with mainstream, high-performance impleme…

The problems were Sun's failure to recognize that cheap IBM PC clones would disrupt them like they disrupted mainframes and Sun not trying hard enough to overcome Wintel's network effect. Sun needed to die shrink old designs to get something that they could fabricate at low cost and compete on price. Such a thing would have canabalized Sun workstation sales, which might be why they never did it.

Re: Show HN: BitKeeper – Enterprise-ready version control, now open-source

#144

Post by nickpsecurity »

ryao wrote: post #143
nickpsecurity wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really doubt it. There's not enough demand to make them competitive in price-performance. The server chips have stayed badass but still niche market. There's even open-source, SPARC HW with reference boards for sell from Gaisler. That didn't take off. I liked the desktops but there's no money in them. Market always rejects it. So does FOSS despite it being the only open ISA with mainstream, high-performance impleme…

The problems were Sun's failure to recognize that cheap IBM PC clones would disrupt them like they disrupted mainframes and Sun not trying hard enough to overcome Wintel's network effect. Sun needed to die shrink old designs to get something that they could fabricate at low cost and compete on price. Such a thing would have canabalized Sun workstation sales, which might be why they never did it.

Could be. It's gone now, though.

Re: Show HN: BitKeeper – Enterprise-ready version control, now open-source

#145

Post by ryao »

bcantrill wrote: post #37

The grand irony is that Larry was one of the earliest advocates of open sourcing the operating system at Sun[1] -- and believed that by the time Sun finally collectively figured it out and made it happen (in 2005), it was a decade or more too late.[2] So on the one hand, you can view the story of BitKeeper with respect to open source as almost Greek in its tragic scope: every reason that Larry outlined for "sourcewar…

Bit keeper is a great example of what happens when you do not open source your code. I have cited it that way many times.

Re: Show HN: BitKeeper – Enterprise-ready version control, now open-source

#146

Post by ashitlerferad »

devnonymous wrote: post #45

Great news! Better late than never! I hope they (or a client of theirs) create a BK backed service soon. I for one, think we need more than just github and altassian in the market if only to ensure the businesses don't take their users for granted (hint: sourceforge)

There are tons of alternatives to github/atlassian/sourceforge:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_open_source_soft...

Re: Show HN: BitKeeper – Enterprise-ready version control, now open-source

#147

Post by rbsmith »

pklausler wrote: post #53
qwertyuiop924 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I though SCCS had the same problems as RCS. What did it do differently?

In short, RCS maintains a clean copy of the head revision, and a set of reverse patches to be applied to recreate older revisions. SCCS maintains a sequence of blocks of lines that were added or deleted at the same time, and any revision can be extracted in the same amount of time by scanning the blocks and retaining those that are pertinent. Really old school revision control systems, like CDC's MODIFY and Cray's cl…

| CDC's MODIFY and Cray's clone UPDATE, were kind of like SCCS

Do you have references? I've heard of these but haven't come across details after much creative searching since they are common words.

Re: Show HN: BitKeeper – Enterprise-ready version control, now open-source

#148

Post by luckydude »

ryao wrote: post #145
bcantrill wrote: post #37

The grand irony is that Larry was one of the earliest advocates of open sourcing the operating system at Sun[1] -- and believed that by the time Sun finally collectively figured it out and made it happen (in 2005), it was a decade or more too late.[2] So on the one hand, you can view the story of BitKeeper with respect to open source as almost Greek in its tragic scope: every reason that Larry outlined for "sourcewar…

Bit keeper is a great example of what happens when you do not open source your code. I have cited it that way many times.

Except that we've been around for 18 years and made payroll without fail that entire time. Supported a team of 10-15 people every year. That's something, many many companies in the valley, including many that open sourced everything, have not done as well.

You may have done more by open sourcing whatever it is that you have done; if so congrats.

Re: Show HN: BitKeeper – Enterprise-ready version control, now open-source

#149

Post by augustz »

canadiangeek2 wrote: post #136
luckydude wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is to answer this question and all the "too late" comments. Too late? Maybe. But we had a viable business that was pulling in millions/year. The path to giving away our stuff seemed like: step 1: give it away step 2: ??? step 3: profit! And still does. So what changed? Git/Github has all the market share. Trying to compete with that just proved to be too hard. So rather than wait until we were about to turn out…

My $0.02 canadian; Build something that kicks Gitlab and Github's ass. What an opportunity. Support both BK and GIT repos. Provide a distributed workflow that enterprises will love. Enterprises are obviously where the remaining dollars are. There are billions of dollars of inefficiencies in that sector. Many of these enterprises do NOT want to host their code on Github and are buying Gitlab. Be better than Gitlab.

Great comment. Good points. Also - for enterprise, it's OK if the model ends up being a bit simpler than git - may actually be a positive. Give up some things, but get simplicity that scales to a 1,000 folks using some old VCS.

Looking forward to some hopefully differentiated features.

Re: Show HN: BitKeeper – Enterprise-ready version control, now open-source

#150

Post by muizelaar »

luckydude wrote: post #123
bcantrill wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is my understanding, yes -- but the NSE and (McVoy-authored) NSElite chapters of the saga pre-date me at Sun. Before my "Fork Yeah!" talk[1][2], from which this is drawn, I confirmed this the best I could, but it was all based only on recollections of the engineers who were there (including Larry). I haven't found anything written down about (for example) NSElite, though I would love to get Larry on the record t…

The NSE was Suns attempt at a grand SCM system and it was miserably slow (single threaded fuse like COW file system implemented in user space). I did performance work back then, sort of a jack of all trades (filesystem, vm system, networking, you name it) so Sun asked me to look at it. I did and recoiled in horror, it wasn't well thought out for performance. My buddies in the kernel group were actually starting to qu…

There used to be a paper on smoosh here: http://www.bitmover.com/lm/papers/smoosh.ps but it's gone now. Do you mind putting it back? I'd like to read it again.
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