free software

Make this Bitbucket free

Jordi

This is something I wrote a while ago on a Bitbucket bug post. Since then, I’ve close my Bitbucket account, and I still haven’t found satisfactory free hg hosting. I have this, but it feels very makeshift and temporary. I don’t care too much about all the bells and whistles like bug tracker and wiki. I never used that. I just want to have some hosting, and I want someone else to take maintain it, for a fee, if necessary.

I’m reproducing this because Bitbucket might some day decide to take down my request which is currently public, because free software needs free tools and I still want a free commercial hg hosting. If you know of someone, please let me know.

(Reported by jordigh on 2011-09-27)

I hope you hear me out. I hope someone with some decision power hears me out.

Right now, Bitbucket is not free. When Bitbucket has functionality that I dislike, I am not free to implement suggestions for you. At best, I can beg and argue with you when you decide that my suggestion is not a good one. If Bitbucket were free, I could go and implement it and show you, “see, this is how it could work, what do you think?” I could have much more leverage with which to help Bitbucket be better if it were free.

I was told that Bitbucket is not free because it is commercial. I do not understand why this is an explanation. Red Hat is free and commercial. Some of the best money I’ve ever spent. Gitorious is free and commercial despite more directly competing with a behemoth like github. From what we know of their finances, both of these are successful commercial ventures. And they are free.

I am not asking you to give up your trademark, your savoir-faire, your brand image, your hosting, your servers. Ultimately, all of this is what you really sell, just like Red Hat sells support and Gitorious sells support and hosting. I only see you adding value to Bitbucket if you make it free.

Hell, I will pay for access to the source. As much as 50, no, 100 USD per month for a premium source access subscription. Make it so that only premium subscribers have read access to the master Bitbucket repository. I will pay for the privilege to collaborate with you instead of begging you to make changes and arguing with you when you decide WONTFIX, HOLD, LATER, NOTABUG, CANTREPRODUCE.

Make it AGPL. If I or anyone else decides to run off with the source and make a knockoff site (which, btw, I haven’t seen happen with gitorious yet, perhaps you have?), your source won’t give us a competitive advantage, because we won’t have the service, hosting, trademark, brand name, and support you actually sell. Give me the opportunity to buy another product from you.

As it is stands right now, I am not happy with Bitbucket. I think it has potential, but I can’t fix it when it doesn’t work. Every user of this site is a developer. Every user is a potential collaborator, moreso than any other kind of software. We hackers also like to hack with our and on our tools. We are already writing code. We all give you our source. You don’t give us yours. We gave you Mercurial, Python, Pygments, Django. Please give us Bitbucket.

Collaborate with us. Share source like we share it with you. Make it free.

Charles McLaughlin

written 2011-09-27

* Changed status from new to wontfix.

Hi Jordi,

Thanks for your suggestion and the offer to hack on our code. This has come up before, for instance in issue #1566. You make some great points, but we still don’t have any immediate plans to open source the entire code base. For starters, we link against Mercurial, so if we distribute the code it would become GPL. If we wanted to sell a “behind the firewall” version of Bitbucket with a different license we would need to rewrite a significant amount of code and possibly shell out to hg to avoid linking. Since Atlassian bought Bitbucket a year ago we’ve added hundreds of improvements, stabilized and improved performance, and scaled the infrastructure to handle huge increases in users and repositories. That’s were our focus is, but we are committed to the open source community.

While this doesn’t satisfy your request, as we develop new features we’re open sourcing as much as possible. Here’s an example:

Tracking Slow Requests with Dogslow

And there’s more to come.

Regards,

Charles

(written 2011-10-03 on by jordigh)

First of all, thanks for at least giving me a complete answer instead of simply dismissing me as a lunatic.

A few scraps of free software unrelated to the functionality I actually care to influence or modify don’t serve my needs, you are correct. I find scraps to not be a strong commitment to free software. I want the whole thing. Paying for it, like I said.

As to linking to the GPLed hg code, I suggested using the AGPL, which as you know, is much stronger copyleft compatible with the GPL. That way, you don’t have to rewrite anything (and it’s arguable if you can avoid copyleft by using a different interface), and if someone forks off your code, the source alone won’t give them an unfair advantage since they can’t add modifications to it and use it publicly unless they share them back to you.

I really think the real value is the hosting and the maintenance. And being able to submit patches. I see you as selling your services. If I could have those things, I would be happiest with bitbucket. I have my own hg hosting, but it’s a pain to maintain, and I would be happy if I could pay someone else to do it.

As for influencing your direction of development, I’m very disappointed to have received an email today about things you have implemented, none of which I want or need, and at least one that alarms me (git…?).

Furthermore, I’m hosting some GNU development on bb. I can no longer do that in good conscience. Since you don’t offer what I want, and I can’t influence what you are doing with the website except with ineffective pleading and arguing, I will be working this week on moving my work off bitbucket, closing my account, and maintaining my own hosting elsewhere. I’m sorry it has come to this.

Good luck with that git.

We do what we can because we must

Jordi

A recent conversation with a friend about Twitter vs identi.ca prompted the following response, slightly edited for formatting and anonymity:

<my friend>
man.. that’s my primary annoyance with the open source movement

<me>
What is?

<my friend>
the belief that everything has to be duplicated especially for open source, or it’s invalid

<my friend>
and a version of something that already exists with a smaller community around it and a worse user experience is somehow better

[snip]

<my friend>
someone creates something useful, and then a bunch of people jump on it and do a piss poor job trying to replicate it because they lack the ability to actually design (in the architectural as well as UX sense) and come up with a shit product that they think everyone should use because of some subjective moral high ground

While we were having this conversation, I was sitting in a cafe, it was a lovely sunny afternoon, the sun was beginning to set, and I was feeling very peaceful. I briefly tried a sort of rebuttal but couldn’t conjure up the energy to continue when the argument started to get heated. I replied instead that my surroundings were making me feel mellow. I wanted time instead to respond, which I will attempt to do now.

Let me first try to address the concern at hand. Twitter vs identi.ca. If Twitter exists, why should identi.ca exist? The only reason I started to curiously poke around identi.ca is that I noticed Debian people were using it, and I’ve found that I’m very like-minded with other Debian users and developers. So I trusted their judgement about the usefulness and safety of identi.ca, and I started using it. I’m not particularly defensive about either website; I still think microblogging is kinda dumb. I just wanted to see for myself it would be as captivating as everyone seems to think it is, and I was glad I found a microblogging service that my friends seemed to like.

And yes, it’s true that the fact that I have the source for the website, (it’s under the AGPLv3, which is like the GPL but activates its copyleft clauses by network interaction, e.g. a website!) gives me warm fuzzies. I like having source, and I’m a little sad that the other big websites that I use frequently for their services, bitbucket and gmail, don’t give me source. I briefly tried out gitorious because I wish I could at least submit patches for bitbucket, but then that’s git, and I still prefer hg.

At any rate, if I have two websites of approximately equal functionality, one gives me source, another one doesn’t, then I will disregard popularity and choose the one with source. It’s just what I prefer. I think this is what the attack about “high moral ground” was about, that I think a website should be used because it has source.

I would like to defend against the accusation of high moral ground or holier-than-thou attitude. I now try to never personally appear or act that way, except in very obvious jest (e.g. by speaking religiously about Emacs). I have learned that telling people, don’t use that software, don’t buy that product are extremely counterproductive, so I’m not trying to impose upon anyone any sort of rules of what software I think they can or can’t use. I wish everyone was using identi.ca instead of Twitter and that identi.ca would stay free with that burst in popularity, but the way to that goal isn’t by telling people what they should do; at best you might suggest why they should value source for its own sake, because it enables other kinds of interaction, but it’s pointless to pontificate. So if I or any of my peers in the free software movement have pontificated to you, I apologise for myself and I apologise on their behalf. Empty rhetoric is not what we want you to get out of our work.

Which brings me to the rest of the accusation, what in my friend’s words is a “shit product”… which I don’t think identi.ca is, the interface seems very polished to me (I probably shouldn’t have started off showing the interface by showing off my own identi.ca dark theme; dark themes seem to provoke very intense negative reactions in people). If my wish of everyone using identi.ca or (Octave instead of Matlab!) won’t happen with preaching, then how will it happen? By building a non-shit product, one with a good user experience, one that is architecturally sound.

Clearly being free software isn’t an impediment to being of good quality. We can find software both free and not of good and bad quality. But if there is software that already exists of good quality and it’s not free, then why bother creating a free alternative? And here I come again to Octave and why I felt a poignant need to write this blog post. I am, after all, working on a free project with which I hope to give Matlab users and other people with numerical computing needs better ways to freely collaborate. Octave does frequently receive accusations of having a bad interface (but Jacob Dawid’s Quint project in our private Octave clone may very soon fix this!), of not having enough toolboxes, of being slow, of not having a JIT compiler… all of these are complaints of varying validity. Matlab users have come to expect them, and if we are to offer Octave as an alternative that respects their freedom, we also need to address user complaints.

Here I come to what I felt was the crux of my friend’s complaint. Why bother? If there is something that already works, why recreate it freely and offer something that is a worse user experience? Well, I find this defeatist. If you had the option of software of equal functionality and quality, wouldn’t you prefer it to be free? I think you, yes, you deserve free software, so I’m trying to build it for you, with you. It may not be all that you want right now, but we can always try to make it better. Perhaps you may even help me! Or not, you’re free to do what you want, just improve it privately without even giving me your improvements. That’s fine too.

Will we ever win? Will Octave ever be the de-facto numerical computing environment instead of Matlab like our brothers-in-GNU with the R project are for statistical computing? Will identi.ca receive Twitter refugees when the company takes an irredeemably evil turn in the future? Who knows. But we must not lose heart. We have the capacity to build something better, and because we all deserve something better, we must keep trying. It’s our duty to ourselves, as a community. It’s not a holier-than-thou attitude; it’s thou-art-just-as-holy-as-everyone-else attitude. These are worthwhile windmills to tilt at, we have the steed, we have the lance, so tilt we must.

Linked on Reddit

Jordi

Oh, dear me.

A few years ago, I wrote a strongly-worded opinion piece on just why I believe so strongly on free software. Today it was linked on Reddit. While I do want free software everywhere, and I would like to completely abolish the notion of proprietary software, I see that as a distant dream. My immediate goal, my highest priority is to have free software for mathematics, because I think that hiding source and restricting distribution are the antithesis of mathematical work. Others have other priorities, but for me, free software in mathematics is highest.

In this vein, I wrote this some time ago. It’s a piece many people have read, and it always seems many have an opinion about. Many love it, but also many strongly disagree with it. They cite objections that say that the ends justifies that means, that having a good software package for doing mathematics trumps any need to have its source, that it’s ok to hide source if you’re making money, and that without the money that restricting distribution provides, you wouldn’t have quality software at all.

Needless to say, I believe all of these objections to be false if stated absolutely, as there are plenty of counterexamples to each, of varying degree. Nevertheless, I don’t have the energy to individually present them again, nor to address my detractors in the Reddit comments. I’m both sad and happy when I read those comments, and I wonder which direction the discussion overall will take. As for that beacon in the free software movement, Richard Stallman, whatever you might think of him, you have to admire him for his boundless stamina to be able to tirelessly participate in these discussions, and for being so self-consistent both in words and actions about what software freedom should be.

For the moment, I do not feel like arguing about this anymore. I feel like actions. Talk is cheap. I’ll show you the source. Perhaps we will never amount to anything, perhaps Octave will forever lag behind Matlab in one way or another, perhaps Sage will forever be a patchwork of individual programs of varying quality. Or perhaps not. Regardless, I don’t care. We must proceed. I must proceed. We must do, we must keep faith, because it’s obvious that even if the goal is unattainable, it’s the right goal. I would hardly be a hacker-errant of the rueful countenance if I didn’t think so.