Bitbucket.org

[Ondrej Certik]

On Fri, Aug 1, 2008 at 10:51 AM, Jesper Noehr <jesper at noehr.org> wrote:
> On Aug 1, 2008, at 10:29 AM, Paul R wrote:
>> On Fri, 1 Aug 2008 09:29:12 +0200, Jesper Noehr <jesper at noehr.org>
>> said:
>>
>> Jesper> Hosting isn't free. There's really no magic to the site,
>> Jesper> anyway.
>>> --
>> Jesper> Let me clarify: Our servers are hosted in a datacenter, and we
>> Jesper> pay for that out of our own pockets. That's not free. Hosting
>> Jesper> *with* us is free :-)
>>
>> GPL v2 and v3 apply whenever program bits are distributed. BitBucket,
>> being an hosted service, can't be *itself* "open-source" or
>> "closed-source". The code behind the scene, itself, could be licenced
>> *if it were distributed in any way*. But AFAIK, nobody here own a copy
>> of this software, except the copyright owners themselves.
>
> This is true. We have yet to decide on a license, but it's largely
> irrelevant as we're not planning to open it up (yet.)
>
>> So, Jesper, if I'm right BitBucket provides a service of mercurial
>> hosting, free of charge for a certain category of projects, paid for
>> other categories, but the software you developed to get this service
>> running is kept for your service only and not distributed in any way.
>
> Right.
>
>> So maybe you can develop on : "Why do you beleive your incomes are
>> more guaranteed if you don't share the program ?"
>
> Because if we release the source, nothing keeps other people from
> launching their own Bitbucket instance and charging lower fees (or
> doing it for free, for that matter.) I'm a firm believer in open
> source, and I would like to release the source to the public, but
> there are certain aspects to that which would make it a bad decision.
> That being said, there is  possibility that we will release the source
> later on, after we have (hopefully) gained some marketshare, and don't
> have to struggle to be noticed. We're not keeping it to ourselves
> because there's any kind of secret sauce in there.

Of course. Thanks for doing it, mercurial needed something like this
for a long time. People that just want to host their own repo can do
that easily with freehg, I wrote a wiki how to set it up here:

http://www.selenic.com/mercurial/wiki/index.cgi/HowToSetupFreeHg

I support the business model as well and, btw, that's why I prefer BSD
over GPL for certain projects (like libraries), so that companies can
even sell the software and thus making it more widespread.

That said, if you make some parts of your site opensource later, it'd
help other people in creating similar sites thus making mercurial more
useful.

Ondrej