To Evil! by Danny O'Brien

Those who sow scandal and schism, Dante says, have their bodies split entirely in twain, and stumble about, split from bottom to topknot, in the Eighth circle circle of Hell.

For obvious reasons, I'm not entirely happy with that judgement.

Then again, Dante got away with all kinds of gossip about his contemporaries, and he escaped Hell. Maybe there's a special exemption for Certified Moral Researchers, like the DMCA has an exception for Certified Encryption Researchers.

One would hope so, otherwise April will have seen almost every open source commenter setting out to Hell in two handbaskets each.

"There is a theory which says that only crazy people work on version control system. There is another theory which says that the first theory gets the causality backwards."
- Anonymous

What makes version control systems (VCS) so great is this: lots of people can take your code, make little branches, and fiddle around with it in a distributed fashion. Then at some point, you get to merge it all back together in such a way that the VCS will seamlessly delete all the wrong bits, and leave you with a pile of conflicts that takes weeks to manually pick through.

By a stunning coincidence, that's what VCS do to people, too. And so it came to pass last month: after Andrew Tridgell genially attempted to create his own little branch off the BitKeeper main trunk and start fiddling with it, Larry McVoy started thinking that maybe things were getting a little *too* distributed around here, and attempted to merge things back into the bottle. The merge failed spectacularly, and Linus Torvalds was forced to manually choose between two source branches - McVoy's way, or the open highway. A hideous three-way merge with a very long and twisty changeset history indeed.

So, asked the peanut gallery, who sowed the schism here? Was it Andrew Tridgell, for commencing to reverse engineer BitKeeper, with his l33t haxx0r telnet tool? Was it Linus for temporarily failing to keep his, as we say in the south of London, big mowf shut on who was wrong and right? Or was it Larry McVoy, the [THUNDER ON SOUNDTRACK] proprietary software developer who led them all down this primrose path of dalliance with nicely-featured closed, version control systems?

Perhaps before answering that question, we qualify it with another, one that is too seldom asked in open source circles: Who cares?

At least, who cares now?

Oh sure, last month, we were all hanging over the ropes, egging on each side to pile on. But now, what has happened? McVoy, muttering about those ungrateful wretches of Open Source, has moved on to selling BitKeeper under the harsh burden of weeks of constant publicity. Torvalds himself has done what a Torvalds does, and, spurning reverse-engineering, has forward-engineered Git, a minimalist version control system that eats kernel patches for breakfast and spits out long ChangeLogs and release candidates, as it should.

The battle now progresses, as open source battles inevitably do, to long wars of attrition where working code is thrown by armed theorists at opposing tribes until rough consensus or broad societal collapse prevails. Nothing but feelings were hurt. Only, as ever, the worst the flames do is waste time, and all our wars ever manage is to imperialistically expand and conquer the world of ideas.

And Tridge? Tridge wrote a utility that may well be useful to someone, gave it away, saw another bright and shiny thing to understand and explore, and moved on. Also, he kept his big mowf shut. Such heights we should all dream of, before giving in to temptation, and plummeting to the Eighth Basement Floor.

As the final part of this month's schism-sowing (and what have I to lose at this stage?), let me introduce Hugh C. Hansen, professor of IP law, giving his viewpoint on the open source movement. It's part of a talk on the Grokster case at April's Fordham Annual Conference on Internatinal Intellectual Property Law & Policy, of which he is conference director.

The moment was captured by Benjamin Mako Hill who gets his kicks from moseying around IP conferences and learning things about those who feel Strong IP is fabulous IP.

Such inquiry into the opinions of others is to be discouraged, of course. By off-the-cuff insults, if necessary:

PROFESSOR HANSEN: "The technology community has, what, radical elements who want free copying; Open Source people who are barely sane... Thank God for open source. If it weren't for open source, these people would be creating viruses. I consider it basically occupational therapy for these people: to keep them at least not committing serious crimes on the Internet"

The audio is available on Benjamin's site, or mirrored here.

I don't think that Hansen is evil for thinking these things, or even making the claim that open source is occupational therapy and we'd all be committing serious crimes if it wasn't for all these open ssh sessions. But imagine if IP law wasn't the overcomplicated mess that it is today? What would people like Hansen be doing?

My fear is he may have stumbled into reverse-engineering, or worse.

Returning Professor Hansen's complement to you wannabe virus-writers out there, let's award him the Evil Award for April. Not for what he says, or for what he does, but for what he *might* have done.

Had he not been so thankfully distracted by the noble calling of intellectual property law.

Want to be the millionth person to nominate Maureen O'Gara this month? Mail 2evil@osdir.com now!

Danny O'Brien is the co-editor of NTK incarnate.

To Evil! appears monthly.