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Linus Defends Proprietary File Formats [Updated]
Simon (S2) writes "Torvalds launched a blast against OpenOffice.org, and defended Microsoft's right to keep its binary Office formats proprietary. 'I'm happy with somebody writing a free replacement for Microsoft Office. But I'm not fine with them writing a free replacement just by reverse engineering the proprietary formats,' said the Linux founder. 'Microsoft has its own reasons for keeping them proprietary, and I can't argue with that.'
At the heart of Torvalds' decision to refrain from using Bitmover's BitKeeper source code management tool last week, a day after BitKeeper decided to drop its limited functionality free client, is a dispute between BitKeeper developer Larry McVoy and Samba developer Andrew 'Tridge' Tridgell. It has subsequently emerged that Tridgell was working on a clean room reverse engineered implementation of McVoy's proprietary software, and Torvalds has come down on the side of his friend McVoy." Update: 04/13 17:24 GMT by T : As reader Daniel Callahan points out, this is a goof. "The Register article made up the Torvalds quote. The article offers the quote
and then continues: 'Actually he didn't - we just made that quote up. But what Torvalds really
did say this weekend is only slightly less bizarre.'"
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
And it shows the quality and direction of where the Register wants to take its articles. The Register is not the National Enquirer . If he wants to make the Office format analogy with Linus there is a way of making it without appearing as sensational as you expect to read in a pure BS publication.
Unfortunately, you can't assume that submitters will shape up. Trolls can troll the slashdot editors just as easily as they can troll the rest of us. But unlike ordinary posts, they don't get modded down once somebody discovers an obvious mistake. They don't disappear off the front page; the best we can hope for is a retraction.
So what do I recommend? Nothing, really. The editors, if they wish, could work a lot harder to verify the summaries, and Slashdot would be somewhat more valuable. Or they can continue to do what they do and trust their readers to figure it out. If they do, I'll keep doing what I do, and treating each Slashdot article with a serious grain of salt until I read the original source. Which is OK with me; I get what I pay for.
Sad that in this case it comes from an actual quote from The Register, a reputable news source. They made it easy to take the quote out of context, and that's bad writing. I'd expect to see this from J. Random Blogger and repeated on Slashdot, and I'm disappointed to see it in The Register.
Parody is an appropriate tool for social commentary.
Bruce Perens.
Linus worked for Bell Labs as an intern the summer before he started work on Linux. He was invloved in the development of their UNIX.
I wonder if Linux is somehow *tainted* by Linus seeing all that Bell UNIX code.
I know samba refused to accept code form anyone who saw the leaked MS code base.
Linus is a hack and a thief.
RMS is a pretty nifty thinker. Granted, what he thinks about is code, and you may disagree with him, but I've NEVER read any of his writings that didn't indicate that he'd given the subject a great deal of thought.
I don't know about The Register, but ZDNet 'news' is starting to do anti-Linux trolls with very little substance. I think their intent is to start flamewars to increase their page hits.
I don't think Slashdot is above that kind of behavior.
What's wrong about printing a fake quote, and then admitting it's a fake?
Everything!
It's not nearly as clever as the author thinks, it's not terribly funny nor very illuminative of the issue, and it imposes a burden on the person falsely quoted.
But most of all, it erodes the trust in the publisher. Most of us have limited time, so we need to be able to assume that the publisher of a serious site tries to quote accurately. A reasonable number of mistakes are unavoidable, but unless the site is intended to be a humor site, the content must be trustworthy.
When a publisher deliberately publishes a fake quote, it doesn't help to say, "Ha-ha! Just kidding!" or "RTFA". The trust is weakened already.
What a boo-boo!
--- Attorneys Assisting Citizen-Soldiers & Families -
I keep hearing this. The reverse engineering effort was done without using a copy of BitKeeper (but using files it produced, of course). As far as I can tell this means all the people saying the reverse-engineering is somehow stealing BitKeeper's ideas mean there is no more to BitKeeper than a file format. If that's all BitKeeper has to offer, if there is nothing sufficiently innovative to patent or sufficiently complex as to be impossible to duplicate without knowing how it works internally then it just isn't that special.
Chernobyl 'not a wildlife haven' - BBC News
Writing is another matter. It's not so critical. It matters only if your peers require a particular data format.
Last time I tried to submit something (analysis of the validity of the GPL in the UK for a law journal, by an IP lawyer) it was rejected. I watched the submissions which made it through at the same time and wondered to myself, "why??".
the layman's guide to computer science
Ermmm.. how do you think reverse engineering works? There's buttloads of trial and metric shedloads of error.
You are correct that RE often involves trial and error. RE -> TE.
You are incorrect that TE often involves reverse engineering. TE !-> RE.
For example, you might know that the application only accepts certain types of data. One of the first trials would be sending different data types, and monitoring resulting successes and failures. There is no need to take the software apart in any way, to disassemble binaries and libraries, etc. You're just sending various bits of data into the application.
I suppose RE purists call this "information exchange", but it's probably the lowest level of RE that there is, as it only really shows you what works, instead of how things work.
I love when people say its ok to reverse engineer the document format of some word processor only if there isn't anything available to read it. And that intentions matter at all when reverse engineering.
Either you are for the free exchange of information and equal access to ALL programs, no matter how many clients exist and for what platforms or how large the companies are that made them, or you are against it. It can't be both ways. You can't chime in and say if its a tuesday and the sun is shining then its alright. We're not talking morality or ethics here, we're talking legality and freedoms.
You can't impose your own morality on others as law...and if you try you might just become the president on the united states.
Some other things you must be against if you are against the ability for someone to interpret file formats- aka data:
- VCR's
- DVR's
- VMWARE/Emulators
- File system drivers
- Word Processors
- Free MP3 players
- DOS and all IBM PC derived OS's that use BIOS
- Multiformat Printers
- bnetd
- Samba
- Apache (Mime Magic for instance)
- unix command "file"
- Kaffe
The list goes on and on. Did all of these technologies have to reverse engineer something? Likely not all, but the common theme is that they interpret a foreign format that wasn't necessary intended to be used with them. And if companies had the ability to squelch interoperability, how many of them would be helping to proliferate open standards or publish their own private standards?
So please don't post how the intentions matter here. A data file is either treated as speech or its not. If its ruled a communication- such as a language 2 people use to pass information to each other - then you have every right to read and interpret it in any way you like. If the contents of that data file are your property, then you own the data. If you own the data, and its encoded in a file format, you are simply reading that which you already own.
Anyway, this thread is ridiculous. Linus didn't say that, but I do believe that individuals have the right to come out on either side and change their mind at any time on what is right or wrong. But Linus isn't making laws, he is just saying he doesn't think its good. Thats a personal choice on a particular incident, not a stated position.
If you ask him if it should be illegal to reverse engineer the bitkeeper archive formats, he'll probably so no. If you ask him if its a pissy thing to do to his buddy's company, then he might say yes and ask you not to do it.
IIRC, I read that something like 90% of the work in the software industry is in-house and contract work, rather than software for distribution.
Maybe just don't start a software company that sells software instead of programming labor (i.e. contracting).
DNA just wants to be free...
The bottleneck here is that Linux is currently maintained by Linus Torvalds. Linux is currently the kernel for the GNU operating system. It has mindshare and it's going to be hard to replace. If Linus continues to use proprietary products for maintaining Linux as managements and submissions become more and more complex, it is going to become increasingly difficult for the Free Software community to contribute.
Right now, the options aren't a ground up new SCM system (of which many already exist). The options are:
- Persuade Torvalds to move away from the dark side. Ask him to stop using Bitkeeper. Point out the many ethical problems other contributors have been having with him doing this. This has been pretty much the strategy of the last three years, and far from actually making a difference, has actually made none whatsoever. Linus prefers, as he's demonstrated here, to attack his contributors - attack the very people who have made Linux usable, made it interoperate with Windows networks for example - rather than address their concerns.
- Reverse engineer Bitkeeper, using the information to write compatable clients.
- Dump Torvalds. Fork the kernel. That's radical, and it's going to be hard to get people on board with a single fork.
I'm not going to rule out (3) from happening eventually, but having failed with the first, we're now seeing people resort to the second, which despite the bloody-minded behaviour of the BK people, is probably going to be successful.I can't blame them, and I can't see anything remotely unethical about what they're doing. I am staggered that anyone sees reverse engineering in the hysterical terms you do. Far from it being unethical, the question should be why these protocols need to be reverse engineered in the first place. Why aren't they documented?
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
The free client was costing Bitmover $500,000 a year, explains McVoy.
Now how did he figure this out? By taking the number of people using the free client and then multiplying by the price he will charge for the non-free client?
This is exactly the same math that Microsoft et al use to estimate how much piracy costs them! It completely ignores the fact that many of those using the free client will not, repeat not, cough up the bucks to use the non-free version.
My guess is that BitKeeper is not going to see anything near $1/2 million moving into their coffers as a result of this decision.
'You can compete with me, but you can't do so by riding on my coat-tails. Solve the problems on your own, and compete honestly. Don't compete by looking at my solution.'
Ah, bullcrap! Tridgell was not trying to use any of BitKeeper's techniques. He says directly in the article "The aim was to provide export to other source code management tools and provide a useful tool to the community,".
In other words, he was trying to provide a migration path to other source code management tools for people that could no longer use the free client that McVoy no longer provides! McVoy, in the time-honored Microsoft tradition, thinks that he has the right to "lock-in" customers by providing, and then withdrawing, a free version of his software to force people to pay. Then he bitches when someone else wants to provide tools to move them off of what he no longer wants to give away. If you don't want to give it to me for nothin' anymore, fine. But don't tell me that I cannot reverse-engineer your files, containing what may be a considerable amount of my effort, to move it somewhere else when you do so.
Somebody needs to explain to Mr. McVoy what "compete" means!
Start here.
Some choice selections:
Shall I go on?
I prayed about it, and God said, "Don't do it!" But I thought, "I know better."
Anything of value is in the comments section. Yes, crap gets upmodded, good stuff gets downmodded, a lot of people are shit-stupid, the admins come in every so often to fling their authority around and hide their lying abuses of the system, and fully half of the dialogue consists of Slashdotters complaining that the good old days were so, so much better.
But still, I come here for the comments.
Subscription money doesn't go to the commenters, it goes to the editors---who don't even bother to edit. Why send money to them?
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
I have few elements to back it up but I wish to submit an hypothesis: Torvalds reacts as if he had a moral deal with McVoy, and had been betrayed. "We use your free (as in beer) software, you got public advertising, you keep it free, we do not cost you anything nor threaten you (commercialy), we benefit from your good product".
Everybody was happy. Now Torvalds has lost a very valuable tool for him, and he is upset about it especially since any mediation was refused.
I am not technically qualifed to judge if the reverse-engineering was justified on a practical basis, nor to define if the main added value of BK lies in its protocols rather than in its code, nor even to judge if the "integrity" argument is void, but I am pretty sure it delivers a signal: "do not develop proprietary network-based tools for Linux; should they proove useful, you will not make a penny with them in two years time unless you lock in customers in another way".
Probably a bad signal.
I am not Remy Mouton, unfortunately: http://remy.mouton.free.fr/art/
I think the process Slashdot's going through is called "tabloid". The daily tabloids do this all the time. "Man murdered little girl" in big print on the front page. Read the article, and it turns out the "man" was 17, the murder was a traffic accident and the "girl" was a female cat. Okay. That was not the best example, but I'm no sleazy tabloid headline "journalist"...
Yes, using a biased "watchdog" group to prove the other bias is a worthwhile argument.
Careful with those quotation marks, your bias is showing. As I write this, the front page of Media Matters has articles about MSNBC, ABC & CBS. However, I can find no mention of Fox News on your MRC link. Is the FNC exempt from this "liberal media" moniker?
Also, it's worth noting that at least part of your examples come from editorial opinion-type shows. Holding Fox as a whole responsible for bias in an opinion show is silly.
Do you believe that the average television news viewer makes that distinction? Does the O'Reilly Factor carry a disclaimer that says, "The views expressed in this program are not necessarily those of the Fox News Channel?"
Look, now the bias horserace is neck-and-neck!
This sentence must be what got you the +1 Insightful mod. As long as news media is produced by humans, bias will be inherent. The only news media outlet I know of without notable bias is C-SPAN, and that's because they just show a video feed of the House & Senate floors with no commentary. That's not journalism, it's just reporting.
In fact, I would argue that bias in journalism is important and desirable. Without it, the news regresses to a faux balance of "he said, she said" bullshit. My point was that the FNC has bias, not that the other media outlets do not.
I prayed about it, and God said, "Don't do it!" But I thought, "I know better."