Bitbucket.org

[Ondrej Certik]

On Fri, Aug 1, 2008 at 11:33 AM, Jesper Noehr <jesper at noehr.org> wrote:
>
> 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.


Yes, I do have a question. If you look at my guide above, it's quite
pain to install it, you need to setup apache (that is ok), but then
you need to fiddle with /etc/mercurial/hgrc, which I don't like at
all. Is there some easier way?

How do you handle this?

Also the apache config is quite complex (and I fear error prone). I am
looking for some easy way to make freehg much more easier to install
and I think you could help with that.

BTW, if you later release some parts as opensource, use a regular
opensource license, like BSD or GPL, so that it can go to
Debian/Ubuntu, please don't use affero -- I think that license is
balancing on the edge of free/non-free. I'd like to have some easy to
install package that one can just "apt-get install" and it would
provide the hg server hosting. For the time being based on freehg, if
we manage to streamline the install a bit.

Ondrej