News Torvalds knifes Tridgell

Figuratively speaking, that is - but after his previous outburst, King Penguin has inserted the blade and is starting to twist, according to elReg:

Linux founder Linus Torvalds has followed up his weekend condemnation of reverse engineering with an astonishing personal attack on the integrity of one of the most respected figures in the open source community, rsync author and Samba co-lead Andrew Tridgell.

Torvalds accuses Tridgell of playing dirty tricks with his proprietary source code tool of choice, Bitkeeper and destabilizing the product. These are serious accusations to make.

Torvalds uses the pay-for proprietary software to manage the Linux source code (obliging other kernel developers to follow suit), but last week its owner, Bitkeeper CEO Larry McVoy, yanked the license, pushing Torvalds to look for an alternative. He's now going to write his own. For this inconvenience, he blames Tridgell.

Tridgell, we've learned, was attempting to gain knowledge of the Bitkeeper protocols on the wire, so he could allow the Linux kernel developers to retrieve their source code metadata from the dark dungeons of Larry McVoy's back garden (ie, Bitkeeper). This metadata is one piece of information that Bitkeeper regards as proprietary - to itself - so, if you're not a paid-up Bitkeeper licensee, you never get to see it. But kernel developers like to have this information, and Tridgell was trying to open up the possibility for a third-party client to work with Bitkeeper.

More on the flashing blade here

 

I'm still more inclined to blame Linus for choosing bitkeeper in the first place, sure there wern't many options and the situation he was in couln't have continued along the same road, but to have the champion product of the OSS world rely on closed software, just stunk.

 

Seems like Torvalds' lost his meds again.