That's an interesting quote. Especially the first paragraph.
"You own your data, even when it's trapped in a proprietary application. There is a term in American law, conversion, for the act of refusing to give back property of others that has been entrusted to you for safekeeping. This is probably illegal wherever you live, too, and when proprietary vendors trap your data and refuse to let you get at it except through their application, they may be committing a crime.
In the open source world, we think this gives you a right to do whatever is necessary to retrieve it. The wrong, if there is one, isn't in creating open source rescue tools as Tridge did; it is on the part of proprietary vendors who refuse to provide facilities for export to an open, fully documented dump format.
In fact, in this case McVoy did provide such an export format. All Tridge did was figure out the magic words that tell the BitKeeper server to dump that information to the client. His rescue tool--I've seen it--is a trivial script. So there was no wrongdoing on either side here, just McVoy shooting his mouth off because Tridge figured out how to use a poorly documented feature."
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