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.'"

Comments

This points out Linus' inconsistency very well

[Bruce Perens]

Linus didn't blast OpenOffice, but doing so would have been consistent with what he's been saying about Bitmover, and this story hoists Linus by his own petard. Tridge did not attempt to reverse-engineer the internals of the Bitmover program. He reverse-engineered its over-wire protocol in order to produce a program that would interoperate with it over the net. This was a perfectly moral and reasonable act and parallels what Tridge did to make Samba compatible with Windows file and printer sharing.

Bruce

Re:Dupe and a lie

[jfengel]

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.

Grow up.

[Bruce Perens]

Parody is an appropriate tool for social commentary.

reading and writing are not the same

[r00t]

You damn well need the right to read any format you wish to read, and this is 100% ethical. Anything less would mean that your data is locked up, along with properly licensed 3rd-party data.

Writing is another matter. It's not so critical. It matters only if your peers require a particular data format.

Re:More Decent Submitters, then

[Ithika]

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??".

Re:Dupe and a lie

[squiggleslash]

And they'd be able to interoperate with Linus Torvalds how exactly if they wrote an incompatable SCM system?

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:

1. 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.
2. Reverse engineer Bitkeeper, using the information to write compatable clients.
3. 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?