BitMover's closed-source product, BitKeeper, was used for source control for the #Linux kernel. Larry McVoy, CEO of BitMover, was upset because someone tried to figure out how the BitKeeper worked and he pulled the BitKeeper licenses from Linux developers.
Needing distributed source control, Linus Torvalds created #git in a couple of months.
BitMover is gone and BitKeeper is now open-source, gathering dust, in a git repository.
@ovid
Not even figure out how it worked, he figured out the protocol used to talk to the server, to enable him to write an open source client. And he did so by telnetting to the bitkeeper port and typing "help".
That someone was Andrew Tridgell of Samba fame.
Bitkeeper could have gotten a free open source client. Instead they got a free open source competitor (git) and couldn't compete with that.
@ovid What always surprised me is that McVoy saw firsthand Sun making a very similar error by letting Linux overcome SunOS. How come he did not foresee what was coming? And what happened to him after?
@nojhan It's not really surprising given typical capitalist's arrogance "I pretend to be better than everyone else, locking down everything will enable to me to keep convincing myself that I'm better"
Just look at One Rich Asshole Called Larry Elison, and how many times they repeated the same mistake, buying fompabies and trying to kill their Libre Software projects…
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