The irony, Bitkeeper itself went open source in May of 2016.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitKeeper

I don't quite see the irony there. Bitkeeper earned good money for ten more years. I was working in a shop which paid $$$ per seat, per anno and many felt that was a fair deal. My own needs were rather simple and I would have been as happy using hg, but bitkeeper didn't give us much trouble and when, it was promptly resolved (one could actually call them).

> However, Larry conveyed his very legitimate worry that a fast, stable open source project such as Mercurial poses a threat to his business, and that he considered it "unacceptable" that an employee of a customer should work on a free project that he sees as competing.

Something being ironic isn’t always a bad thing. Specifically this is situational irony as the thing the creator of Bitkeeper feared (open source ripping off his product) eventually became moot when he open sourced Bitkeeper.

if i’m not mistaken, it was the same heavy-handed response from the same owner of bitkeeper that lead to the creation of git.

Working two jobs is often a conflict of interest, and it's normal for that to not be allowed.

It's why there is the concept of the Chinese Wall - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_room_design

This includes public facing social media. You are now a publisher.

You can still get angry at Disney for allowing one sort of Twitter account but not others or firing people over jokes. But this is 2005, it's a bit late.

Risk it, or be secretive or get written permission. Don't be an NPC and not understand reality.

> Working two jobs is often a conflict of interest, and it's normal for that to not be allowed.

Wherever you went with this in your head, you drove past the point a while ago, I think. It is absolutely not normal for a vendor to dictate what an employee of a customer does.

OP was not working for Bitkeeper, he was simply at an employer that used BK. That is a wholly different situation.