[Bitkeeper-announce] BK/Free end-of-life

[Larry McVoy]

This is a message to the users of the free version of BitKeeper.  I'll 
follow up tomorrow with some information about what lead up to this 
decision but I felt you needed a heads up.  We'll work together to 
figure out how to move forward.

--lm

As our business evolves we must continually evaluate our product offerings
and some recent changes may impact you.

Over the last 12 to 18 months our Free Use product has been consuming an
excessive amount of our resources which in turn has impacted our release
schedule.  We have given it our best effort to maintain both our commercial
and free products, but have come to the conclusion that this is no longer
possible.  We will now be focusing exclusively on our commercial product and
end-of-life the free product.

As a user of the free product you have several options available to you and
your team.  Rest assured that nothing will happen immediately.  Everyone
will be given time to think about which option works best for their project.

You can choose to convert your project to commercial BitKeeper usage.  If
your project has sufficient traction in the market place, or sufficient
corporate backing, you may decide that commercial BitKeeper is the right
choice for you.  Projects which choose this path may continue to use
bkbits.net, or use your own site for hosting.

You can choose to convert some of your developers to commercial BitKeeper
usage.  Your developers who require advanced features can use BitKeeper and
your other developers can use the open source client to track your project
from bkbits.net.

You can ask for a conversion to a CVS repository.  Resources permitting,
we'll provide a conversion for any repository currently hosted on
bkbits.net.

For those of you who may rely on the open source projects maintained in
BitKeeper, we are finalizing plans where major projects will continue to
have a BitKeeper tree on bkbits.net.  We will track the Linux kernel
indefinitely.

We understand that this may be an inconvenience for you, however, the
future looks bright for several open source SCM systems.  CVS, Subversion,
Arch, Darcs, Monotone, etc., are all progressing nicely and for many
projects are mature enough to be used today.  We appreciate the support
that you have shown us over the years and we look forward to working with
you in the future.  Please visit our website for additional information.

Larry McVoy
CEO, BitMover