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06/01/2005: "Bitkeeper going down (film at 11)"

Reading between the lines of this Forbes article, I think Larry's company is getting its ass kicked.

I knew Larry at Sun, and while he did some good work, he was commonly viewed as an asshole. (Yes, I know, pot->kettle->black.) AFAIK, he stll is.

McVoy is well known and well respected in the Linux Community. He was the chairman of the program committee of 1999 LinuxExpo technical conference and has sat on many other technical program committees.

The trouble is, I don't know of anyone using Bitkeeper on a commercial basis, nor does the Bitmover website offer up any. Now Larry's company, once so full of promise, and having "allowed" the FOSS community to wring out the bugs in his offering, has pulled all support for the hosted FOSS projects. I'll bet the blowback is imense. Time to pull out the PR flaks for a puff-piece in Forbes. In it Larry argues against any and all commercial success of FOSS, forgetting, or ignoring that it wasn't about commercial success.

McVoy argues that the open source phenomenon may appear to be sustainable but actually is being propped up by hardware makers who view open source code as a loss leader--something that will entice customers to buy their boxes.

"Nobody wants to admit that most of the money funding open source development, maybe 80% to 90%, is coming from companies that are not open source companies themselves. What happens when these sponsors go away and there is not enough money floating around? Where is innovation going to come from? Is the government going to fund it? This stuff is expensive."

Even the popular Linux operating system would suffer if hardware makers stopped their sugar-daddy support for its development--putting their own programmers to work on Linux, and sending payments to the Open Source Development Labs, the non-profit organization that employs Torvalds and some of his key lieutenants.

"If hardware companies stopped funding development, I think it would dramatically damage the pace at which Linux is being developed. It would be pretty darn close to a nuclear bomb going off," McVoy says.

McVoy says he believes the software industry will reach some kind of balance between open source and traditional software companies. Open source companies will make commodity knockoffs and eke out tiny profits, while traditional "closed source" companies will develop innovative products and earn fatter profits.

Heretical as this may seem, McVoy wants to be on the side that innovates and makes money.