In the Free and Open Source Software world there are “events” and then there are Events, the capital meaning they are likely to be of interest cross-project. Although this concerns the Linux kernel specifically, I am sure it is of interest to many. Reported on Kernel Trap, Larry McVoy is dropping “free’ (as in beer) support of Bitkepper, the versioning system used by the kernel project and reportedly it helped to pump the kernel developement to an all time high.

Also worth reading is Linus Torvald’s statement, sarcasm and irony nicely pepppered in the text:

It’s not like my choice of BK has been entirely conflict-free (“No,
really? Do tell! Oh, you mean the gigabytes upon gigabytes of flames we
had?”), so in some sense this was inevitable, but I sure had hoped that it
would have happened only once there was a reasonable open-source
alternative. As it is, we’ll have to scramble for a while.

The politics and collaborative possibilities of version control systems and how the play out along the lines of free vs open, individualism vs collaboration, centralization vs distributed, etc are worthy of an entire dissertation. I don’t have enough of a love of the technology to do such a project but it is ripe, waiting to happen.