BitTorrent Closes Source Code

An anonymous reader writes ""There are two issues people need to come to grips with," BitTorrent CEO Ashwin Narvin told Slyck.com. "Developers who produce open source products will often have their product repackaged and redistributed by businesses with malicious intent. They repackage the software with spyware or charge for the product. We often receive phone calls from people who complain they have paid for the BitTorrent client." As for the protocol itself, that too is closed, but is available by obtaining an SDK license."

Comments

Not RTFA? Read this at least.

[tonsofpcs]

So basically BitTorrent bought uTorrent and is staying closed source (as uTorrent is now). Q: How will this impact the BitTorrent open source development community as a whole? A: There will be no impact to the BitTorrent open source development community. We are committed to maintaining the preeminent reference implementation of BitTorrent under an open source license. Although the latest documentations won't be published for the world to see, an aspiring BitTorrent developer or a hardened coder can still obtain the specifications on the latest protocol extensions by obtaining a SDK license.

Re:Not RTFA? Read this at least.

[PaintyThePirate]

Not exactly. The only mention of an SDK on the Bittorrent site is part of a "device certification program", that would undoubtedly involve paying Bittorrent in exchange for licensing their now proprietary information and some offical seal of approval. There is no mention of open source projects being able to see/use any changes in the protocol. Luckily, I assume that most bittorrent trackers (public or private), will ban any incompatible official client if the protocol does change, rather than adopting the official client and abandoning all of the others.

Re:In related news...

[Anonymous Coward]

And uTorrent belongs to Bittorrent(company) and always has been closed source.

Re:The argument doesn't scan..

[grcumb]

I'm a bit confused by this. Isn't this what licenses are for? Why not just sue the people selling and profiting from your open source product for breaking the license?

Because that's not enough to constitute infringement of the license. People are welcome to repackage and resell GPL software. But they also need to consider trademark issues. They can call the software almost anything they like, they can claim that their product is just like another, but if they claim that their product is the other one, then the original company can take them to court and sue their euphemisms off.

And that, of course, is why claiming that GPLed software is open to this kind of abuse is the reddest of red herrings. Trading on someone else's good name is well covered in the laws of most countries, and the GPL has exactly zero impact on such abusive practices.

Re:In related news...

[starwed]

But utorrent has always been closed source.

rtorrent pwnz

[Anonymous Coward]

get rtorrent
http://libtorrent.rakshasa.no/

with adsl2+ i could get >1meg/s with hundreds of connections, totally stable and only used around ~1%cpu time on a p3 933.

use gentoo and -O3 it too.

Re:GPL

[Secret Rabbit]

The GPL cannot keep the original author from changing the license and closing the source nor can it prevent the protocol from being closed either.

The only thing it can do is keep that source (the version that was under the GPL) available to the open-source community. Which, btw, can be accomplished by any other open-source license. Btw, they have already done this.

Basically, we're in the exact same situation now that we would have been if it was GPL'd.

Re:Oxymoronic: thief cries thief !!

[SL Baur]

Torrents are for stealing !! Get use to it !! Blizzard uses an early version of the bittorrent code for their "Blizzard Downloader", I am told. Anything that reduces the download time of something I've paid for, like the online BC upgrade or update patches seems like a win to me.

It's a pity they're going closed source, but it wouldn't be unfair for Blizzard to toss a few gold pieces back their way given all the money Blizzard is making.

KTorrent

[Enderandrew]

KTorrent is my favorite pure torrent app on any platform, with utorrent running a close second. Both are very fast, light-weight clients.

I've also dabbled with mldonkey and shareaza as more multi-purpose p2p apps that also support torrents.

Re:It was only a matter of time..

[kripkenstein]

One difference. They don't operate any of the servers people actually use. Unless they can convice the server operators (most of whom they can't legally even admit exists, which will make negotiations somewhat awkward) to adopt their closed protocol, who will notice any optional dead protocols their 'official' but little used client supports?

No, that isn't quite true.

First, Bittorrent is a peer-to-peer protocol. Only a minor part of it is communication with the server (aka tracker). They might keep the tracker protocol exactly the same, and alter the important p2p part.

Second, this has already been done, and successfully. For example, utorrent came out with a 'PEX' (Peer Exchange) protocol that wasn't in the spec. So it was only used between peers that were both using the utorrent client. This provided a nicer bittorrent experience for utorrent users, especially as utorrent's marketshare rose. Later on, because of utorrent's dominant position, other clients started to implement utorrent PEX (KTorrent, libtorrent-based clients), with varying degrees of success.

A similar issue is Azureus's DHT protocol, which is not in the standard. Although at least Azureus is open source, so you can read the actual code to help in understanding what nonstandard protocols they have invented (but then they also have a very nice wiki).

The point is, it is easy to 'embrace and extend' the bittorrent protocol, even if you don't have control of the servers. Is 'extinguish' next? Probably not, but I for one won't be using the official Bittorrent client.