Happy ending? Or a good riddence? I may not have been as blunt in my post-mortem of the falling out ... Ok, I probably would have if I had your ear in a pub and maybe gone a few steps more depending on the hour, but nonetheless, I couldn't have said it better than Richard on how the break with BitKeeper is a Good Thing for Linux, and a Good Thing for free software in general.

We should not forget the lesson we have learned from it: Non-free programs are dangerous to you and to your community. Don't let them get a place in your life.
[ via BitKeeper bon-voyage is a happy ending ]

Hear, hear. And further to that notion, I'll risk of munged paraphrase of what John Cage said about pianos:

Proprietary software is like money; any intrinsic value is only a misperception by those who own it.

Back about 4 years ago, we were working with mega-publisher MCP on precisely this sort of thing, plans for a general HowTo Linux phrasebook guide for Windows programmers who had seen the light (or lucky enough to work for managers with good future-sense) and now must embark down the long road porting their prior O/S choice mistakes into a reliable open operating system. We couldn't find anyone willing and able to write our book back then, but it seems we were simply too far ahead of the curve ...

The wave of migration to open source in business has the potential to cause a tremendous porting traffic jam as developers move the ever-pervasive Windows application to the Linux platform. In this three-part series, get a mapping guide, complete with examples, to ease your transition from Windows to Linux.

Part one begins with inter-process communications, and oh boy are you Win-kernel people in for a treat!

[ read Porting Windows IPC apps to Linux ]

Are the Linux distributions violating the GPL? Sends a shiver down your spine, don't it. Ce n'est pas possible! Perhaps unthinkable, but nonetheless, it may be true, at least true for that handful of crews using a package manager to distribute their distro-harmonized binary-format bundles.

Allow me to explain ...

First off, so there's no mistake, let's establish our ground rules and quote from the source, from the GPL2 Terms and Conditions, section 3:

"... The source code for a work means the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it. For an executable work, complete source code means all the source code for all modules it contains, plus any associated interface definition files, plus the scripts used to control compilation and installation of the executable."
GNU General Public License version 2

Ok, now, this says that if you distribute software, you must make the source available for free.

That means the source of the binary you are redistributing, including any patches you may have applied, the source code for the software you actually bundle.

Now here's where it maybe gets a little fuzzy, fuzzy enough for vendors to retain their proprietary edge while remaining inside the letter of the law if not it's spirit: C/C++ code is source, no question, and .h header files are also indisputably source code. So are Makefile and even configure.in and Makefile.in and herein the problem ... what about config.status?  read more »