my apologies

When one of my own engineers groans at reading my reply, I take that as
a sign I crossed the line. I know you guys are busy so I'm sorry for
adding noise to your mailing list, it won't happen again.

Perhaps what I should have said is this:

- Licensing. ESR and I have different ideas about what works. He wants a
  utopian world which I don't believe exists. We choose a different licensing
  model where we tried to provide some balance by giving you the source code
  and the right to hack the source code as long as you don't break it. Not
  breaking it also means that you don't disable what we believe to be our
  revenue generation techniques. We did this because it was the best model
  we could think up. While we don't think that ESR's utopian world will work,
  that's no excuse for harassing him about it, he's entitled to his views.

- Who did what. Eric is a bright guy and we have talked about BitKeeper.
  While I don't believe that resulted in any profound changes, it's quite
  possible that he evolved my thinking on some points. He deserves thanks
  for anything that he did, but that's it. I felt he went too far and
  called him on it; I should have been more polite.

- On helping Subversion. ESR could add value to Subversion, at least that
  is my belief. There are some very smart people working on Subversion
  (third handle knowledge but two smarter guys than I have told me
  so repeatedly and I believe them), which begs the question of what
  could ESR add? He can write good code when he wants to do so and
  he does have a lot of knowledge in this area. And he's an old time
  Unix person and there is a far bit of useful history in there. If he
  weren't so opposed to our business model, I'm sure we would be having
  many pleasant engineering discussions. Since he likes the Subversion
  licensing, I really do believe that he could bring some good ideas to
  the table, he's an old Unix hand, so the Subversion team really ought
  to welcome his help.

Again, my apologies for adding to the noise on your list, I hate it when
people do it to me so I should know better.

Good luck with your efforts,

-- 
---
Larry McVoy            	 lm at bitmover.com           http://www.bitmover.com/lm