Tridgell speaks re BitKeeper dispute

ZDNet Australia reports on Tridgell's keynote presentation at Linux.conf.au 2005 in Canberra:

Tridgell particularly sought to reject claims that he had somehow violated the proprietary BitKeeper code by reverse-engineering its metadata formats for use in an open source client, thus leading BitKeeper to revoke the Linux development community's licence.

To cheers from the 500-strong audience, Tridgell demonstrated how information available from BitKeeper's own online help made gaining access to that information a trivial task.

"We have now, in a single line of shell, implemented a BitKeeper client," he said.