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Tridgell Reveals Bitkeeper Secrets
wallykeyster writes "The Register is reporting on Andrew Tridgell publicly demonstrating how to interoperate with Bitkeeper. During his keynote at the Linux.Conf.Au, Tridgell connected to a BitKeeper site via telnet and used the mostly forgotten "help" tool. Ethical arguments of aside, what really counts as reverse engineering anyway?"
Does anyone remember taking thier first radio apart "just to see how it works". This in the most base form was reverse engineering. Personally if you have the resources and the desire, by all means. Find out what makes it tick. The only reason Bit-Keeper is annoyed is because they see a free product competing with thier own. Not yet persay, but in the very near future.
If we don't make light of everything, we are just stumbling in the dark - Blank
Exactly. He didn't do something immoral, like cloning the IBM PC via reverse engineering.
We should have never had the PC revolution, because that resulted from the availability of PC clones.
We should have to pay over $1000 for a system with only 200 megs of disk and 8 megs of RAM. We should eat from the poison tree of reverse engineering.
(end of sarcasm)
Seriously, reverse engineering is legit. It is responsible for a lot of progress. It used to be legally protected, until insane laws (DMCA) and insane judges (Southern District of New York, Federal court system, etc) got involved.
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
Actually I think it is good for bitkeeper. No one at my company had ever heard of BitKeeper until this controversy started. Now they're looking into using it.
Any publicity is good publicity
The DMCA specifically allows reverse engineering for compatibility.
I just had a discussion over dinner with some friends about this very subject. What it basically came down to was that even if there is a provision for it, it's gonna take someone with deep pockets willing to go to court over this. Hell even Adobe won't take it on, and they'd need it to use the Nikon raw file format.
The discussion also brought up an interesting point -- When is compatibility not the reason to reverse-engineer something? I mean even if you reverse engineer with the intent to make your own product, are you not technically trying to interoperate with something else?
You can take accountability for a product when it is used according to a contract and not take accountability for it when it is misused. The manufacturer/service provider takes accountability under specific conditions.
Your suggestion that it is necessary to keep the BK protocol closed because the BitKeeper people want to be held accountable is just plain bogus. They did it to prevent competition.
Also, you still can't get docs on a whole lot of BIOS stuff which was reverse engineered years ago, because of indefinite-duration contractual obligations.
In any case, certainly, using telnet to type "help" and reading the resulting documentation does not count as reverse engineering. It is instead a form of RTFM/RTFD.
> One of the reasons BK kept their stuff closed was so they could take accountability if anything went wrong and now exactly how every client was accessing it.
Yeah, I know and I think it is bullshit.
Nobody should rely on the client to be nice.
A while ago, any computer running ICQ could simply be shot down by a wrongly formatted package that ICQ would parse and break on it and (in the days of Windows 9x) take the OS with it.
From what I read, BitKeeper has the same problem : a client can completly trash the repository if it doesnt respect the protocol. Which I call slopy design.
I client shouldnt be able to make more damage than the user has rights and HEY! it's a f*cking version control system. I DEMAND that any change done by any client can be reversed easly (after all, this is what I use a VCS for).
For me, it looks like BitKeeper has a HUGE reliability problem in that it relies far too much on clients respecting the protocol and that they cry out that loud to avoid people from looking closer at this design problem.
I have discovered a truly remarkable proof for my post which this sig is too small to contain.
Reverse engineering is not morally wrong...in fact, it is specifically protected by all the copyright laws in the US.
Heck, "reverse engineering" is "figuring out how something works", AKA "hacking" (NOT "cracking"). This is the basis of most good technological progress and, in a different realm, science.
Of course that is until people look deeper into what the publicity is all about. McVoy pretty much illustrated the inherent dangers of not being Open Source -- that at a whim (of a madman?) all your data are belong to them.
Worse yet, we've illustrated that here's someone who's willing to do just that...yank his product from under a high profile project.
If your company is looking into using BK, you may wish to take these recent events into consideration or at least bring them up to those making the decisions.
Because that's the best time to attack someone. I think, despite what you say, Linus didn't believe it must end. He felt this one would be different. Ultimately he made a bad call, he's angry about it, and to distract attention from his misjudgement he's attacking someone who can't respond.
And Perens? This is a slugfest that only Gates, Darl, and RMS would love - all for differing reasons. Why does Perens feel compelled to call out Linus over his treatment of Tridgell?
Because someone had to do it, and it had to be someone with the standing. Linus is doing something horrible, but do you think he or his fans would listen if you or me called him on it? Which I would, in an instant. But probably only Perens and ESR had the stature to do this.
I am trolling
Kinda like how openssh is morally wrong because you can buy directly from ssh.
Since when is using ideas developed by someone else morally wrong? Just think the moral quagmire we'd be in if scientists did shit like that. There are specific ways to protect ideas (and/or implementations): copyright, patent, trade secrets. You want to now extend these protections to any form of machine without some application process?
I think I understand Linus' thinking about this based on some of his emails that were not as widely circulated as others. Linus is a pragmatist. He doesn't see open source or reverse engineering as intrinsically morally good or bad.
He sees them as good things if they produce good (profitable, valuable) results. He is upset with Tridge because he believes that Tridge had no good (profitable, valuable) end-game. Tridge's actions were destined to destroy the cooperation between the Linux kernel team and BitKeeper. Yet there is no situation in which those actions lead to benefit to either the kernel team, or the open source community or the BitKeeper company (in Linus' opinion). Here he is in his own words.
In other words, it wasn't the act of reverse engineering that is wrong. It is the act of screwing up Linus' life and BitKeeper's advertising scheme without having any beneficial side effects.
Truer words were never spoken, and I thank you for posting them. Sad thing is the rest of your comment indicates you have set them aside already, or perhaps never had them.
There is absolutely nothing unethical in what Tridge did here, at least insofar as has been mentioned in any of the reporting on this in the past few days that we've both had access to. There is absolutely no ethical obligation to keep an agreement you were not a party to. The rest of your rant assumes facts not in evidence, without any source, and has the definate whiff of BS to me.
In fact, what Tridge has done here is the epitome of ethical behavior. Linus is stung now, understandably disoriented and angry because he's been proven wrong and, being human, his first response is to lash out at Tridge instead of thanking him. Give it a few years though... once his wounded pride settles down I'm sure he will, in fact, thank Tridge for this.
Locking your data into a proprietary single-vendor format for the sake of temporary convenience was never a good idea. Everyone told Linus this, but he was too smart to listen. Now exactly what he was warned about has happened. And it was inevitable all along - if Tridge hadn't done it someone or something else would have - McVoy was a ticking time bomb. The fact that the guy isn't very stable didn't help, but honestly - McVoy could have been a saint and the thing would have still been a ticking time bomb. If Tridges actions resulted in it going off a little sooner than otherwise, then he saved Linus and many others trouble in the long run. Replacing BK wasn't going to get any easier...
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
Sure, but then why not apply that analysis to Larry's action to pull the license?
Once the tool has been developed, Larry has two choices:
* Pull the license (which is bad for everyone)
* Ignore the tool (which isn't so bad)
So, looking at it this way, Larry's action of yanking the license had no good (profitable, valuable) results.
Now of course, Larry can say, but the point of yanking the license is that my threat to yank the license was intended to deter people from doing what Tridge did. I am just protecting my right to make a living off my software. I had to follow through on my threat to protect my credibility; if I didn't, then what would stop people from profiting off my coattails?
But Tridge can say, but the point of reverse engineering the system is that my threat to reverse engineer the system was intended to deter Larry from imposing unreasonable conditions on the community. I am just protecting the the commnity's right to access its data. I had to follow through on my threat to protect my credibility; if I didn't, then what would stop Larry from continuing to refuse to give us the access we deserve?
So, as you see, the "what is practically good (profitable, valuable)" analysis doesn't give us a conclusion here. Either Tridge or Larry could have avoided having the license pulled.
The type of analysis that WOULD decide the conflict is one which looks at who is being treated fairly or unfairly, or one which considered the "rights" of all parties (i.e. my right to make a living off BitKeeper without having it reverse engineered, vs. my right to access the metadata of the Linux kernal development).
For example, if a criminal mastermind had an atom bomb aimed at New York city and demanded your wife and your firstborn child as ransom, and you refused, and he blew up New York, then it wouldn't make sense for someone to say that the mastermind was a good man but that you are responsible for the destruction of New York. But, using Linus's "good (practical, valuable)" analysis, all that can be concluded is that both the criminal and you were responsible. The more sensible conclusion is that your wife and your child have a right not to be ransomed to some criminal, but that the criminal has little right to your wife and child, therefore he is the bad guy here. But this necessarily involves taking a stand on the fairness of each side's demands.
Linus seems to be claiming that he doesn't want to get caught up in a discussion of rights, but by blaming Tridge, he is probably implicitly assuming that Larry's putative right not to have others "ride his coattails" holds more weight than Tridge's putative right to interoperate and to access metadata without signing a license agreement.
Where did you get the idea this agreement exists? What exactly does this agreement say? What evidence is there to show that Tridgell agreed to its terms or did something that required complying with such a clause or be liable for losing a copyright infringement lawsuit?
I'm suspect that Tridgell, who appears to be quite dedicated to software freedom, would realize the implications of agreeing to such a thing and therefore not agree to it.
As it stands, Tridge has said he was not a licensee of the Bitkeeper program. Furthermore, I have no reason to believe he's lying.
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