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.