> Tridge also reverse engineered BitKeeper, the proprietary software that Linus foolishly used to host Linux kernel development for a while.
I wouldn't necessarily call it 'foolish': Linus used the best available tool at the time. (I don't know whether BitKeeper was the best available tool in some absolute sense, but Linus looked around and evaluated many of them.)
> [...] you can type "help" and it then spits out a list of commands to try...
That was actually a nice engineering / UI decisions by the BitKeeper developers, but I'm afraid the morale of the story would be not to make your software too helpful?
> You can then interrogate the repository with these commands and get a complete understanding of all the internal data structures, without ever using the proprietary software, let alone having to disassemble it.
That's a strange use of 'use'? Clearly, talking to some software over the network is 'using' it?
I wouldn't necessarily call it 'foolish': Linus used the best available tool at the time. (I don't know whether BitKeeper was the best available tool in some absolute sense, but Linus looked around and evaluated many of them.)
> [...] you can type "help" and it then spits out a list of commands to try...
That was actually a nice engineering / UI decisions by the BitKeeper developers, but I'm afraid the morale of the story would be not to make your software too helpful?
> You can then interrogate the repository with these commands and get a complete understanding of all the internal data structures, without ever using the proprietary software, let alone having to disassemble it.
That's a strange use of 'use'? Clearly, talking to some software over the network is 'using' it?