There is an interesting thread in the bazaar-ng mailing list going on right now. Anyway, to make a long story short (and save you from reading ~90 posts in the thread), Linus (of Linux/git fame) said the following concerning BitKeepr which I found quite insightful. (Over a year ago I blogged about my take on the bitkeeper debacle:
On a more personal note: people say that BK showed the "failure" of using a commercial closed-source program. I would disagree. Not only did the kernel get a whole lot of useful work out of BK, we learnt how distributed systems should work, and quite frankly, I'd do it all over again in a heartbeat.
If there was a "failure" in the BK saga, it was in how horrendously bad all open-source SCM's were, even with BK showing how it should have been done for several years. THAT is the failure. The fact that there were hundreds of people who whined about BK, and nobody really did anything productive.
Now, I'm obviously biased, but I really do believe that git is the best open-source SCM there is, by a mile.
Interesting, my take is that those of us who only use free software should leave our bubbles every now and then and copy (I mean be inspired) by the latest and greatest of the proprietary wares of the world.
So everyone running linux, go crank up wine and run that fresh new version of IE and be inspired to deliver on the next web 3.0 applications. (And whine because you miss adblock plus) Seriously I like how Linus can be blunt and pragmatic (without offending too many people).