Talk:BitKeeper

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Something's wrong here:

In November 2003, a cracker compromised the CVS interface and attempted to introduce a security defect that would allow the easy operation of trojan horse programs on the resulting kernel. The defect, which masqueraded as a legitimate change by networking architect David S. Miller, was detected and removed within 24 hours of its introduction.

Like this it seems like something out of the blue that has nothing to do with Bitkeeper..? Guaka 20:49, 9 Mar 2004 (UTC)


The CVS repository that was compromised was operated by BitMover and published content that would otherwise only have been available via BitKeeper; ergo the event is not completely unrelated to BitKeeper. I'm suprised to see it immortalized here, though. Andy 23:35, 14 Apr 2004 (UTC)

I removed the chapter:
"In November 2003, a cracker compromised the CVS gateway and attempted to introduce a security defect that would allow the easy operation of Trojan horse programs on the resulting kernel. The defect, which masqueraded as a legitimate change by networking architect David S. Miller, was detected and removed within 24 hours of its introduction thanks to BitKeeper."
IMHO this isn't NPOV because there is nothing special in BitKeeper. The change was easily noticed because there was two versioning systems, not especially because of features of CVS or BitKeeper. -Thv 06:12, 2005 Apr 11 (UTC)

I'm also suprised to see such an in-depth article about BitKeeper on Wikipedia. Is there any Wikipedia policy on commercial entities editing articles of commercial interest to them? How does Wikipedia intend to address the inevitable issues of differing viewpoints in an article such as this? (For example, I'm sure most commercial customers of BitMover are not interested in the aforementioned CVS server compromise, or the fact that BitKeeper is closed-source.)

If the consensus is that a BitMover representative can feasibly edit this page, I'll address some of the factual inaccuracies without affecting tone or thrust, even though those are arguably not NPOV. Andy 23:35, 14 Apr 2004 (UTC)

I'm the author of a fair amount of the current article, although others contributed a lot, before and since I worked on it. There isn't an official policy about "interested parties" editing a page, but I think it's something a lot of people would frown upon (it's similar to people writing golden autobiographical articles about themselves - it's really very difficult to be objective about something one cares about, however hard one tries). Still, by saying your connected with them, and enquiring openly about the policy, you've already gained a great deal of credibility (as opposed to those who just go in and change stuff they don't like). If it were up to me (which it isn't, but then it's not up to anyone else either) I'd prefer that declared parties either leave corrections/additions on this page, on a subpage (e.g Bitkeeper/input) or on a page in their personal userspace. I really don't think the article is very deep at all. It certainly needs much better technical exposition of the product itself, some better details of how the product is sold (it seems to be a more complex arrangement than just shrinkwrap) and some company history. Most of what's there now should be in a section called something like "bitkeeper and the linux kernel". Hmm, I did try pretty hard to keep in NPOV, and I don't think one could say it either has a "larry is evil" character, nor a "larry is a benificient angel" character either. There's certainly an over-emphasis on linux stuff, which has some unfortunate controversy necessarily attaching, and that's something I'm keen to fix. The trouble is that a company of BitMover's size really doesn't merit an encyclopedia article (that's a contentious issue here too, so others will surely differ) of itself, and it's the linux connection that makes it "noteworthy" (whatever the heck that means). And yes, the last paragraph has rather little to do with Bitkeeper and BitMover, but it does go to the bitmover-linux issue. And I've found that either I put in stuff like this, in hopefully a sane manner, or some maniac will come along and insert some craziness ("Bitkeeper has no security and is run by cretins. Linux's only security bug was introduced by bitkeeper" or somesuch). -- Finlay McWalter | Talk 00:09, 15 Apr 2004 (UTC)
Addition: yes, you're right that most commercial customers aren't too interested either in the CVS gateway (or specific issues arising from it in the past) or the licence. But then wikipedia is not a marketing brochure, so it's not really intended for commercial customers in particular. In a more well-rounded article both of these issues would logically be confined to the linux and OpenSource section (where both are significant issues, pertaining directly to the subject at hand). We certainly don't put lots of whiny stuff in about oracle not being open source or having lots of security holes (just as wikipedia isn't a brochure, it's not an open-source advocacy site either). -- Finlay McWalter | Talk 00:14, 15 Apr 2004 (UTC)

[edit] How about some more meat

The "political" aspect of BitKeeper is no doubt of interest to some subset of the geek community. But honestly, shouldn't this article mostly try to explain some of the technology? Version control management is an interesting problem. For prospective users of BitKeeper, this article contains almost zero information. Psm 21:51, 2 Mar 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Perhaps some more context for the license arguments?

Perhaps it's worth mentioning that the license originally did not limit what other software you could work on (e.g. http://web.archive.org/web/20021012223603/http://www.bitkeeper.com/bkl.txt), and it did, in the early days, include modifiable source (iirc the only limit was that you couldn't disable openlogging). Ah, and I just found http://www.mit.edu/afs/athena/user/x/i/xiphmont/Public/critique.html, which includes an older copy of the license, too. Rweir 04:50, 17 July 2005 (UTC)


Can we remove this paragraph yet? pitr 14:16, 5 August 2005 (UTC)

"The removal of the free version makes it very likely that there will be an open source competitor within a few years, since BitKeeper's availability had previously made it unnecessary to develop one and the widely dispersed nature of much open source development provides a very strong incentive to have such a tool."