Torvalds looking for new Linux home

By Stephen Shankland, CNET News.com
Monday, April 11, 2005 09:02 AM
Among those who criticized Torvalds' adoption of BitKeeper was Richard Stallman, the programmer who founded the Free Software Foundation to promote software that's free of such proprietary constraints. In 2002, he suggested creating free software that could interoperate with BitKeeper.

SourcePuller
Recently, Andrew Tridgell, a lead programmer for the open-source Samba project and, like Torvalds, an employee of Open Source Development Labs (OSDL), has begun work to do just that. However, he hasn't publicly released the software, called SourcePuller.

"I did write a tool that is interoperable with BitKeeper," Tridgell said in an interview. "I did not use BitKeeper at all in writing this tool and thus was never subject to the BitKeeper license. I developed the tool in a completely ethical and legal manner."

OSDL hired Tridgell to work full-time on Samba, the consortium said in a statement. "Any other projects he pursues are his own," OSDL said.

That type of work doesn't sit well with McVoy. "All we are trying to do is (1) provide the open-source community with a useful tool, (2) prevent that from turning into the open-source community creating a clone of our tool," he said in a February posting.

BitMover, based in South San Francisco, Calif., and founded in 1998, offered free use of the software for Linux programmers for two reasons, McVoy said: to aid marketing and because he has been Torvalds' friend for more than 10 years.

And Torvalds has said the use of BitKeeper has improved Linux development dramatically. "I'm personally very happy with BK, and with Larry. It didn't work out, but it sure as hell made a big difference to kernel development," Torvalds said Wednesday. "I'm convinced it caused us to do things in better ways, and one of the things I'm looking at is to make sure that those things continue to work."


 Previous 1 2 

WORTHWHILE?

0

0 votes
Blog

Talkback 0 comments

There are currently no comments for this post.


Tech Jobs Now!

Search for your ideal tech job:

Use shades of gray to enhance scale in Excel

Microsoft Office Suite

Excel's palette is generous, but don't throw buckets of pigment all over your spreadsheets just because you can.


Read more »



Ultimate 2012 recovery site: the moon

Blog thumbnail

Have you seen the disaster movie "2012"? A friend from Control Risks and I did, and we reluctantly concluded we wouldn't be able to write off the cost of our..... by Nathaniel Forbes

Read more »

Tags

  1. antivirus
  2. apple ipod
  3. cnet networks inc.
  4. desktop
  5. e - mail
  6. hard drive
  7. intuit inc.
  8. mcafee inc.
  9. microsoft corp.
  10. microsoft windows
  11. microsoft windows vista
  12. microsoft windows xp
  13. norton co.
  14. pc
  15. performance
  16. security
  17. software
  18. tool
  19. web
  20. web site