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Bruce Perens Tells Linus Torvalds To Cool It
Eh-Wire writes "Bruce Perens has weighed in on the controversy surrounding Andrew Trigdell's attempt to 'reverse engineer' the proprietary Bitkeeper code management software of Larry McVoy and the ensuing fallout with Linus Torvalds. Not only does he tell Linus Trovalds to 'Cool it!' he also suggests, 'Larry sees conspiracies that don't exist.' Sounds like Bruce is a bit worked up about this."
Strange question. Linus says (in essence) "reverse engineering the over-the-wire protocol employed by a closed-source application is morally wrong". Bruce says "that's not true, and FWIW, you didn't seem to have a problem when the same thing was done for Samba, either".
How could that NOT be pertinent to FOSS? Open source / free software is not just about writing code; unfortunately, maybe, but that's the way things are, so it's better to deal than to ignore.
quidquid latine dictum sit altum videtur.
If you actually read the article you can see that the sentence Actually he didn't - we just made that quote up. immediately follows the "made up" quotes. It was a joke to make a point by analogy to reverse engineering Microsoft file formats.
In the Bruce Perens article, he makes another analogy -- to the work Trigdell did reverse engineering the SMB protocol. Both articles are pointing out this weird blind spot Linus seems to have in accepting something that is generally supported by the community and completely legal: reverse engineering proprietary protocols is a good thing which frees the open source community from vendor lock in.
If I write an article using the comparison "this is like the Pope saying 'I don't believe in god'" - only Slashdot would get "The pope don't believe in god" out of this :)
I think Perens is really making sense here. (Not that he always doesn, but this time around he hit the nail on the head.)
Why reverse engineering the smb protocol should be considered a good thing, while reverse engineering the protocol bitkeeper uses is beyond me and though Linus has come out strong against the latter he still didn't explain how he can still consider the former to be a good thing.
And above all, I think Linus is behaving very unfair towards Tridgell, who has done nothing illegal, didn't break any contract, but just did what he has done with other things already, which were always considered to be a good thing. Why doing the very same thing considered good in other circumstances now should lead to Torvalds attacking him is again beyond me.
Saying these kinds of things to the press can only hurt the whole OSS movement as it give all the MS
What you are saying is carp. There is no way that rudementary working ethical debate can hurt the OSS movement because it's bigger than any of these players. That's why it's such an advantage over the closed model.
Each of these guys could be pictured in some lewd manner on the Smoking Gun and the whole Open Source movement would still march on!
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
Well.... I think so, yes.
The fact is that I think this is a fairly important debate.
Was Linus wrong for using a propietry tool for the development of the kernel and essentially forcing all kernel developers to follow him?
Could this situation been forseen?
Is Linus angry with Tridge because it actually shows up his previous bad decision and the only way for him to save face is to badger Tridge?
Is McVoy behaving like a spoilt kid and taking his ball home because somebody didn't want to play his game?
I'm personally with Tridge and Perens all the way on this one (not that anybody will care). Reverse Engineering is legal. McVoy needs to deal with that.
If we get a schism, then so be it. It's an important line to be divided by in the development of a Open Source / Free OS.
Okay first things first, everyone should pull their heads in. Linus should give a detailed explanation of how he thinks that reverse engineering is a "Bad Thing", Tridge should break his cone of silence and let the community in on what exactly he was doing, and Larry should get used to the fact that people in the "Open" Source Community are going to want to have a SCM that meets their requirements, both in terms of technical abilities and licensing issues.
I think this is what Bruce was trying to say.
If any of the above mentioned do happen to read this (seriously doubtful I know) this does not imply disrespect for your previous work, just that my seven year old acts like this when he gets pissed off too.
that is an intersting interpretation and an intersting point in itself. however a reverse engineered unencumbered client-replacement is either beneficial to all as a stop gap or diverting effort for the FLOSS to roll their own valid and (r)evolutionary replacement.
-- after all, larry apperently made no money from the free linux clients only loss and his money came from the service he provides in his server software. and maybe more people would've adopted BK and paid for it -- who knows.
tha fact of the matter is ; it is about choice. you are free to hack; you are free to choose what you use and what you do with software.
the BK clients did not let you do that.
these conditions not ebing met give rise to a favourable ecosystem for reverse engineering or completely new Free replacements.
i/ restrictive licence on what your 'intent' is.
ii/ you could only use the official BK client
iii/ the free BK client was crippled.
it was a reverse engineer waiting to happen.
however, i would have imagined that larry feared 'one good turn deserves another', is that these wily open source hackers would cobble together an ENTIRE replacement.
but thats not my main point.
inspired by your statement i think i would go one further; linus is upstaging even RMS himself by allowing himself to be martyred on restrictive closed source software. by showing that he is fallible like us, capable of sin. he shows anger, and revenge -- all the dark side of the force.
we see the error of his non free pragmatism and learn how he atoned for all our non-Free sins.
the man is a genius. thank you.
i shall never hear an mp3 again!
maybe he got sick of esr talking about how Free is abstract and only novel but Open Source pragmatism like Linus's is what counts.
whatver it was we are now approachoing a new higher plateau of maturity. lets sieze on it.
on a legal note: i don't like mcevoy; he comes accross as arrogant and ethically unsound.
is it a gross mischaracterisation by the OSS press?
his products, OTOH, should be put under the microscope for any copyright violations. he sounds so paranoid and fervent taht i am sure he is the sinner "methinks the lady doth protest her [innocence]too much".
or the tainted see guilt and shame everywhere.
thanks,
che
He isn't being one. He's being rational. It's the stubborn people who are trying reverse engineer something that was free with certin limitations. At least Linus is looking for something to replace BitKeeper.
How was it costing them that much? Such figures are just like the IRAA's 'cost of piracy' figures - pure Bull.
Look at the 'cost'..
- is it costing BK the value of the licenses?
.. No. That's revenue that they could have gained if the kernel developers chose to buy it independantly
- is it the cost of developing bug-fixes?
.. don't make me laugh - they have to do that anyways.
- Is is the cost of implementing features necessary for a huge distributed development team?
.. considering that this is precisely what BK was designed for, a large amount of such improvements would be required or requested by their paying customers anyways.
- Bandwidth and server costs?
.. yes, they are costs that BK would have to bear, but I doubt very much that it comes to anywhere near the half a mil a year quoted.
Let's look at what BK gained from the deal- They got massive and public prof that the system did what it was supposed to and worked well at this scale - how many other projects (OS or proprietary) as large would use it and allow BK to say they were using it?
- Massive, massive, huge unspeakable amounts of good publicity - it went from a fairly niche product to something that every linux hacker has discussed overnight!
- I would imagine a large number of big customers would have moved to BK purely for those two points alone.
That makes no sense at all.Tridge should leave what group, exactly?
The group of BK users - that he wasn't a part of anyway? - or the OSS group? "sorry mate, that guy over there doesn't like the look of you, so you will have to give up your hobby. Stop coding now and stop giving stuff away"
You do realise thatthe entire foundation, the whole point, the differentiator of open source software is licensing. The license issue is a hugely important issue, otherwise Linux would not have made it much further past Linus' initial realease. Those people with the skill enough and cared enough to want software with user-friendly licenses picked it up and helped along to bring things where they are - if you don't get the licensing point, you simply do not get open source software.
The Register has been completely biased about the matter so I wouldn't take their word on anything. Linus is pissed off at Tridge because he messed up the deal with McVoy and wasn't even trying to produce anything functional to replace BK. "He just wanted to see what the protocols and data was, without actually producing any replacement for the (inevitable) problems he caused and knew about."
Everybody seems to forget that McVoy contributed more than $500 000 worth of software to the osdl. Without the contribution, Tridge would have never been able to even try to reverse engineer the program.
Linus lost the use of the best SCM there is. Why shouldn't he be pissed?
Proprietary isn't (always) evil!
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.
Linus's description of kernel development as "corraling cats" still holds true. And you don't corral cats by putting a dog smack in the middle of them.
This was a bomb waiting to go off. Linus may be pissed, but reality does that to people when they don't adhere to it's laws.
Tridge didn't do anything wrong. In fact he excel's at doing things right. See the newforge interview to get an idea.
I rarely agree with Bruce's conclusions, but this is one of the times he makes total realistic sense. Plopping the smartest, most dedicated GPL developers on a proprietary system without their consent is tantamount to treason in government. Like fingernails on a chalk board, you could hear the kernel developers principles twisting as Linus declared the use of BitKeeper law.
Linus made a bad choice. Now he gets to pay for it. Cause and effect. If BitKeeper was under an open cource license, then it wouldn't be subject to the whim's of one man's bowel movement on a certain day. But it is, and Linus should have had the foresight to see that.
He isn't just an engineer when he is steering the ship. He is the captain. He has the responsibility to look ahead of the curve, and to not get romanced by the easy way out when he's in charge. But he didn't. He fucked up. Now the role of a leader is to admit the mistake and ask for alternatives. Leave Tridge out of this. He did his job. I hope Linus does his.
. . . just how many BitMover shares does Linus own?
Considerable, if what we're talking about is "mind shares."
Linus has a strong personal stake in useing Bit Keeper and a personal relationship built up by working with Larry over the past few years. Despite being a Finn he is experiencing something called "emotion."
Emotion can tend to make one say and do dumb shit that one wouldn't otherwise do or say, like that dumb shit you do and say when trying to talk to a pretty girl, or, if you're a geek, about a particularly pretty piece of software that you've been living with for years.
She moved out. He's going to miss her. I'll cut him a bit of slack during his grieving period. He'll get over it. Killer apps are like busses, someone tries to introduce a new propriatary model every year.
KFG
Torvalds should be blaming Larry for the situation, not Trigdell. Larry was the one who was judge jury and executioner. The current crisis is entirely Larry's creation, and he is solely to blame.
This whole episode is just proof of how ridiculous Larry's License(tm) is.
Yes, but the problem, as several people have pointed out now, was that the closed nature of the tool may have mode it not "the best tool available". Was it the best in terms of functionality and performance? Apparently. But those aren't the only things you need to evaluate when buying or using a product. You also need to take into account things like cost, risk, reliability, and (particularly in the OSS world) licensing. I'm not an OSS fanatic by any means, but even I could see that Linus' adoption of BK was a bad move.
Regarding Tridge's efforts, I don't see that it makes one bit of difference whether BK was paid for or a gift. In either case "violating the conditions" of using the product would be bad. But Tridge was not a BK user. He was not violating the conditions of using the product. That's what got McVoy pissed: he couldn't stop Tridge by revoking Tridge's license, because Tridge never had one in the first place. So instead McVoy started threatening others in the vicinity.
Linus has every reason to be angry. Someone took away a very useful tool from him. I'd be pissed.
Yes. And that someone was Larry McVoy. Not Tridge.
I try to call them as I see them. But in this case that also fits the goal of PR for the Open Source movement. Linus said something so incredibly bad for us, that could hurt us the next time that we have to reverse-engineer something for purposes of compatibility, that PR for the Open Source community is saying as loudly as possible that Linus is not representing us on this issue, that he's lost his cool for once.
Larry, on the other hand, does his own bad PR. One need only comment upon it.
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
What's more, HURD isn't finished and there's no problem with the concept of forking Linux anyway. If RMS wants a kernel now, that works, and for some reason dislikes something about the way Linux is developed, all he has to do is copy the entire thing to Savannah.org and appoint someone to maintain it. It is, after all, licensed under the GPL.
Torvalds has done some dumbass things of late, and criticising Andrew for wanting to create a Free Software client that interoperates with the SCM Torvalds has adopted is one of them. It's also downright unethical, given he knows McVoy is threating lawsuits, and Andrew is limited to the extent to which he can respond to Torvalds, and given the extent to which Torvalds is himself lying about what's happened.
Conspiracy? Nope. Just smart people doing dumb and nasty things.
Oh, and "Ovum's Barnett": If we agreed with you, we wouldn't have GNU based operating systems such as RedHat and Debian. Linus's little kernel would be an asterisk. Without people wanting certain basic freedoms when they receive software, we'd be using Windows and Unix. Why wouldn't we? I find it remarkable people actually pay you money to come up with this drivel.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.