Bitbucket.org

[Jesper Noehr]

On Aug 1, 2008, at 11:24 AM, Ondrej Certik wrote:
> 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 read your guide earlier, thank you very much for taking the effort  
to do it!

> 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.

I am planning on this, and I try to keep my code commented and  
"community"-ready. Several people (off-list) have been very interested  
in how we are doing certain things, and we are happy to share. If  
anybody here has a question as of to how we accomplish certain things,  
by all means, ask away. Other than that, I don't feel like there's  
anything spectacular about our codebase, and hence I haven't packaged  
anything up and put it out there. If we do get around to doing  
something really cool, we will release the source.


Jesper