“The Linux kernel, an enormous open-source project, used a proprietary VCS called BitKeeper. However, due to a conflict between the community and the company behind BitKeeper, the free-of-charge status was revoked.”
The details about that conflict are worthy of an article in and of themselves :)
Imagine having the most famous open source project using your product for the world to see and losing all that free publicity in a desperate attempt for control.
Yea BitKeeper was a one hell of a story. They also had a clause that holders of commercial BitKeepers licenses could not develop competing products and even forced a company to ban one of their employees from contributing to Mercurial(?) or the whole company would have their BitKeeper license revoked.
The sad part is that BitKeeper really was an amazing product and way ahead of its time, pioneering many of the features git later made popular. Had they just been a bit smarter about the whole thing they could be where git (and GitHub) is today
Ironically the last thing they did before going bankrupt was release BitKeeper as Open Source.
Agreed -- and it's absurd that BitKeeper's enormous influence here has been reduced to two sentences in the article. Not to take anything away from Torvalds and git, but McVoy and BK (and TeamWare and NSE/NSElite before it) are the real pioneers here. I got a bit into this deeper history in a USENIX talk in 2011[0] -- but I would welcome a more thorough treatment!
he has only himself to blame for that. the whole story shows the power of collaboration in the FOSS community. get in the way of that collaboration and you will get rolled over. i have seen that happen multiple times. you get to ignore the will of the community at your own peril.
Not mentioned in the article but I think what triggered BK to pull the license was Andrew Tridgell (SAMBA and rsync) reverse engineering BK's protocol to implement a third-party client.
The details about that conflict are worthy of an article in and of themselves :)
https://lwn.net/Articles/130746/