True, and as long as he was still using it that was a valid argument of his. But it took him and a few others only a few weeks to code a replacement that everyone seems to be even happier with functionality-wise. So while it's clear that BK was a better fit than any of the other existing SCMs, I think I have to agree with the people on lkml who were saying it would have been better to put energies (or incentive) into developing a free alternative in the first place. Just think of all the developer time wasted on flame-wars ;-).
Aside: without knowing either of them personally, I think that particular quote was given to save Larry McVoy (who's a friend of Linus AFAIK) some face.
And the fact that Linus was happy with Bitkeeper doesn't change anything about the danger of keeping one's important data in a proprietary format which is only accessible through a proprietary product. Sure, one should always use the tool that best fits the job, but when part of the job description is "I want to be able to access my data any time in the future, regardless of what happens with a certain vendor/product", programs like Bitkeepet fail the spec.
Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it. -- Brian W. Kernighan
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