Ask HN: Do you regret taking investment?

BitMover/BitKeeper. Nice idea but too late, the market has gone to git.

Which chaps my hide, git is an awful design, it's a tarball server pretending to be a source management system. Source management is basically an accounting program for programmers, it's suppose to faithfully log what you do. How does git do that when it has no concept of a file? Answer: it guesses about renames. And blame is slow because there are no file create or file delete events.

It was trivial for us to create a bk fast-export command and make it work incrementally. It's next to impossible to do it the other way incrementally because git doesn't have a versioned file object.

It's like a file system that has no inodes. To me, it makes no sense. But it won. Yeah. Not.

Thanks for the background. There are indeed awful things about git's design, but I think it would have been very hard to out-market git.

Git is both free AND viral. It's viral because if you want to use someone else's code, you have to use their source control system. Linux using git is a big deal in that respect (and yes I realize the kernel used BitKeeper :) ).

Also, Github as company and git the open source project are pretty complementary. It's hard to house both entities under the same roof, and you need that for ecosystem to succeed. Github is basically a UI/app company, and git is systems plumbing.

It's analogous to some PaaS companies wanting to make their own web framework. No actually that's a huge amount of work and you underestimated it. For all its faults, rewriting Rails is not something anyone can do. Heroku ended up being one of the early success stories because they just took your rails app and ran it.

Likewise everyone thinks they can rewrite Github, but that's pretty hard. It's at least 10x more work than you think, and you can get it wrong. If a tool isn't open source, there's much less incentive for a company like Github to come around and "popularize" it.

It seems like it's very hard to make money in developer tools in general, because so much is open source. And honestly they should be -- I would be a hypocrite if I said I didn't choose tools because they are open source. I guess Github and Atlassian are the outliers.

Anyway, my overall point is that I wouldn't necessarily chalk it up to marketing :) I do think open source got much bigger in the last decade, and it's hard for me to imagine that it wouldn't be built around an open source VCS.

>Git is both free AND viral. It's viral because if you want to use someone else's code, you have to use their source control system. Linux using git is a big deal in that respect (and yes I realize the kernel used BitKeeper :) ).

And BK is (was, until last year [too late]) closed software that requires a paid commercial license to use. Pretty much a show stopper for open source contributors donating their free time.

I'm plenty confident, in fact, too much perhaps. After all, I founded a company that has lasted 19 years (and technically still exists, we have some money in the bank).

That company changed the world. No, we didn't win, but all the distributed source management systems came after us, we were first, they are copies of our model. We invented that space, clone/pull/push/commit are our verbs. We invented, in effect [1], the concept of a changeset. Before us, there was CVS. No binding of a set of related files in a commit. I'm good with that, we changed the world for the better. If you are a programmer your world is better on a daily basis because of us.

As for "my problem being much deeper", not sure where you get that from. I'm retired, I'm fine. Do I have some regrets? You bet.

- I wish Git, since it won, was a pure clone of our stuff, we have a much better architecture, both for accuracy and for performance (try running Git on NFS, then try our stuff. Try running Git with a 4GB repo and then try our stuff.)

- I wish I had made enough money that my team could also retire.

Other than that, I'm good. I've got 4 dogs that I love, live in the Santa Cruz mountains with an awesome family that I also love, I've got nothing to complain about. Well, maybe some health stuff but I'm old so that is par for the course.

[1] One of my guys, Rick Smith, knows way more about this stuff than I do, and he tells me that Aide-de-camp had some sort of changeset concept. So perhaps we were not first. But nobody knew about it. Back when dejanews was a thing you could search usenet in a time range. I remember searching going backwards from the time that we introduced the changeset concept, there either 6 or 9 hits in over 2 decades of Usenet posts. The fact that everyone knows what a changeset is traceable to us far more than Aide-de-camp.

Edit: formatting

A couple hacks helped us. First was finding some short cuts to test the core functionality of the idea and make sure that when we pulled X string, Y things happened (in our case, adjusting air flow of vents had a material impact on temperature across the home was a critical thing to test) and measured with arduinos and raspis. Also, LOTS of nights and weekends 'moonlighting'