[RFC] kbfiles: an extension to track binary files with less wasted bandwidth

[Greg Ward]

On Thu, Jul 28, 2011 at 5:25 AM, Angel Ezquerra
<angel.ezquerra at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Jul 28, 2011 at 10:50 AM, Adrian Buehlmann <adrian at cadifra.com> wrote:
>> On 2011-07-26 21:42, Na'Tosha Bard wrote:
>> Honestly, I don't really care that much about the name of the extension
>> itself, as long as we don't get into troubles by using registered
>> trademarks. So, if we can avoid the word "Kiln", I'm perfectly fine.
>>
>> Using the name "kbfiles" seems safe to me (regarding trademarks) and I
>> have no qualms about it having significant contributions by "the Kiln
>> folks", or its provenance in general. IIUC, the initial work was done by
>> Greg anyway.
>
> I personally like Matt's name proposal. "largefiles" is very
> descriptive of what the extension does. As others said, "kbfiles"
> could be confusing for users, since "kb" refers to kilobyte or
> kilobit...
> Obviously the FogCreek guys should have a final say, since its their
> extension after all...

I couldn't let *this* pass by un-responded-to.

IT'S NOT THEIR EXTENSION.

I designed it, with help from my colleague Peter Neelin and (IIRC)
feedback from the mercurial-devel list. I wrote it. I tested it. I
reviewed patches from several contributors (thanks everyone!). I
mentored a couple of summer students that Fog Creek recruited in
summer 2010 to improve bfiles, and I massaged and merged in their
patches. It's my bloody extension, and Fog Creek forked it. You
wouldn't know that from reading the "hg log" of their repository, but
it's the truth.

And it should be noted that much of the work was done for my employer
on work time. So I have finally added appropriate copyright and
license statements to the bfiles source code:

  http://hg.gerg.ca/hg-bfiles/rev/6f832a089582

Incidentally, yes I did get approval from my employer to release
bfiles publicly under the GPL, and I got that approval quite a while
ago -- spring 2010 I think?

My understanding of copyright law (at least in countries governed by
the Berne convention, including Canada [where I live and wrote bfiles]
and the US [where Fog Creek is based]) is that the source code has
been copyrighted as described by that patch from the second I wrote
it. Adding the formal statements to the code does not change the
copyright status of the work, it merely clarifies it.

Thus, I expect Fog Creek to add similar copyright statements to the
largefiles code. I also expect them to add a third line stating that
Fog Creek shares the copyright, because *of course they do*. They have
written plenty of code in that extension, and it sounds like they have
done good stuff with it. But it's not all their code, not by a long
shot.

Greg