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.