Slashdot Mirror
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."
.. the moment Bit Torrent was commercialised and started playing with the big TV guys this was bound to happen. I'm just surprised it took so long.
Malicious software re-packaging is a lame excuse too.
Suddenly feeling pretty vulnerable without my fire coat...
The Schwartz space ain't from Spaceballs.
What's the name going to be for the upcoming auto-encrypted open-sourced fork of Bittorrent?
Ryan Fenton
Affect them? Hardly at all. Let's face it, other teams have grabbed the ball and are running with it. The official Bit Torrent folks are going to have to work to stay at all relevant, "premier reference implementations" aside.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
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? It just seems to me that the reasoning doesn't make much sense. There are plenty of examples of people selling closed source software that's "free" to people who don't know any better(like Kazaa) and are less tight-fisted with their money than I am. It seems to me that decisions like this don't scare off someone someone who wants to resell your program to make a buck, doesn't help someone so incurious as to not wonder if there is a free version of the software they are being asked to buy, but does hurt the person who just wants the source for their own reasons. Am I wrong?
Yeah ... sounds like the Bit Torrent folks just shot themselves squarely in the foot. I doubt the Azureus developers, for example, have any need whatsoever for an SDK, official or otherwise. It's just a protocol people, nothing more, and it's far too late to close it up.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Does anyone "know" how it will impact other clients? No, we don't "know" that, however, a reasonable estimate would be "not much, if at all."
utorrent may be the single most popular BT client as TFA claims (OTOH, most of the peers I see are Azureus and Ktorrent. I don't know if that's just because I'm in the odd niche of only doing legal stuff over BT (no, it exists, really Linux and *BSD ISOs), or if most people are using those, I don't know.
Either way, what I expect will happen if they go totally closed will be much like what happened with SSH. After the official SSH became closed and proprietary, the OpenSSH project picked up where they had left off, and while SSH is still in business and has a product line, OpenSSH took over the market and is now far more popular, on both the client side and the server. If BT totally closes everything off and makes the protocol incompatible with open versions, I think we can reasonably expect to see the open source version fork and take over the BT market.
Hm, it seems to be referring to UPnP (which I have vehemently disabled on my router).. but I wonder if they have any idea what they're talking about. If you can't accept incoming connections that just means that your client initiates all transfers of data, not that you're completely incapable of uploading. Good clients like utorrent (and apparently not Bittorrent 6.0) will give/trade data without being asked if there's available upload bandwidth. Not the best for efficiency (though I should think it'd at least volunteer less-available data first) but it gets you a high ratio nonetheless.
The "new and improved" RIAA approved BitTorrent protocol. This is the official one that won't be throttled by your ISP. Full of DRM goodies for Hollywood to control.
What?
The problem being that when one company has near monopoly, and in the eye of the public is indistinguishable from the product, they can close source, then change the specs (even if the spec is published), and the open source alternatives won't be able to compete.
This is partially because they'll always play catch-up, and partially because they won't be able to improve the specs themselves -- if they do, they'll become incompatible, and crushed by the product everyone uses.
Example of just this effect: RTF, which Microsoft bought back in 1990. Open source RTF readers are usually several versions behind, and anyone expecting to read RTF documents no matter what version have to use the latest Microsoft products to do so. This is not what the situation was like back when RTF was still open (despite being proprietary), and DEC let anyone see the coming changes.
And that's the best case scenario. The worst case scenario is if they close the specs too. That, of course, will kill them in the end, but in the mean time it's going to cause lots of grief.
worst post of 2007 so far
Out of curiosity, what exactly is "wrong" about them closing the source in Bittorrent's case? I mean, if it was an OS or something where security was critical I could see a problem. But really the only "benefit" I saw from the source being available was a bunch of clients that just leeched without sharing their bandwidth.
I know it's not the Slashdot party line, but not everything benefits from open source. Perhaps more importantly, this sets a bad precedent for companies that want to release code. If they ever have to pull back they have a PR mess on their end. Most PR flacks will just say not to release code to begin with.
Oh big deal. In a big fit of irony, the SDK will hit Bit-torrent within minutes. At the end of the day, Bit-torrent is mostly used for piracy, so Bit-torrent, Inc, of all organizations, should realize that this is an absolutely useless attempt at who-knows-what.
Alternately, all of the open-source clients could develop a separate protocol that they would all implement in parallel to the official one. A fork of sorts, but expect all clients to end up supporting both/all when all is said and done.
How are sites slashdotted when nobody reads TFAs?
One of the things Stallman and company have not managed to fully explain is how exactly I'm supposed to hunt down the "dirtbags" that take my GPL'ed code and repackage it like... well, BitTorrent. Or Audacity. Never mind adding spyware or whatever. If there's enough of them I'll spend more time in court than at the keyboard writing code contributing to his dream. Why not just use a BSD-style license if what I'm trying to do to begin with is help fellow developers, and just spare myself the post-release gastric discomfort?
I'm not sure why you would mind if someone repackaged your software as long as they did nothing wrong with it.
The Free Software Foundation recommends that you give your copyright to them to make sure that no one uses your software to harm others. They have been very successful at getting companies to live up to the terms of the GPL. There is nothing much you can do about spyware additions other than force GPL release of code, so that those additions can be seen and removed.
Releasing under a BSD license gives your fellow developers freedom, but also allows them to add malware that can't be seen and removed. M$ loves your code. If that does not cause you discomfort, you have not thought through what they are doing to you or what they think of you.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
There's a trap waiting to happen.
If they merge uTorrent (non-free, closed) with the older "BitTorrent 5.0" (open source, free), hell's going to break lose if there's any GPLed patches in the open source that Bram didn't make.
GPL applies to even "lowly" patchers and debuggers code, as it does to the 10klines per day guys.. (joke)
Im ready for a torrent of gpl-violations
It wasn't about clients that leech bandwidth, it was about clients with great interfaces, and additional management methods, such as uTorrent or Azureus' web management. In my opinion, the mainline client was so lacking in features that I considered it to be unusable. Bittorrent owes some of it's success to the fact that there are so many great clients for people to choose. If you're looking for simple, try uTorrent or Transmission. If you need advanced features, try Azureus. People like this kind of choice. It saddens me to see this, as it means that clients might eventually become less compatible with closed-source revisions of the protocol, and we'll lose some great file-sharing software.
Unlike porn, which yada yada rimshot hey-ooh!
Slashdot: Failed Car Analogies. Amateur Lawyering. Anecdote Battles.
Did they just say that the issue with open source was people taking the source code and doing there own thing with it? I thought that was the whole point of it.
Im a gamer, not a grammer major. This post is full of spelling and grammer mistakes.
It'll be just like when SSH Inc. closed SSH. Guess what - SSH Inc's ssh implementation is no longer the reference implementation - instead, OpenSSH has become the reference implementation. BitTorrent Inc. can say they are the reference implementation as often as they like but it won't make it true - instead, an open BitTorrent implementation will probably become the reference, and just like SSH Inc. BitTorrent Inc. will fade towards irrelevance (although they may continue to exist).
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
Err, so I need to obtain an SDK license to see the latest specs so I can implement them in my client?
Well, fuck them.
- These characters were randomly selected.
I think there's a danger here that any new closed version of the BT protocol (sufficiently different fromt the original) could become the de facto standard for MAFIAA-approved drmed downloads.
Then they could put pressure on the ISPs to block the old protocol using traffic-shaping. Their argument being that the old protocol is only used to steal copyrighted material (e.g. Linux ISOs.....oh, wait..!).
On an aging Athlon XP2100 using Azureus 2.5.0.4, top is reporting 0.6% CPU and 60MB RAM used. Currently it's downloading at the highest speed I can get on my ISP. I'm only seeding 2 torrents and downloading 1 (with 67 total connections) so maybe it's not a fair stress test, but it feels pretty quick and capable to me.
I wouldn't call KTorrent 'lightweight'. Even with low CPU settins, it routinely eats up between 30% and 50% of my CPU cycles, with spikes in the 100% (old P4-M 1.6 GHz)
"I'm never quite so stupid as when I'm being smart" (Linus van Pelt)
Response to this: fork and die.
BitTorrent/Bram just sealed a casket. Charging for a protocol is like charging for TCP. And with Azureus Vuze and mldonkey out there who cares.
There is room in this world for basically Microsoft and maybe IBM to charge for "protocols," (like the ability to stream WMV and play it), but to open and then close = fork and die.
That Ashwin guy is a rug-merchant type, he knows how to wheel and deal and do the CEO thing, but I think he doesn't get why his company isn't a commercial success, and closing the source code isn't going make commercial miracles happen - this is like a fish flopping around on the deck of a fishing troller. . To throw is words back at him, a bottled genie cant grant wishes.
You think the content companies, and Yahoo, and all the other people trying to trickle-channel or channel media with P2P don't have the specs for a protocol like this? What would prevent them from DIY rather than pay BT? Nothing.
Legalize the constitution. Think for yourself question authority.
I think you lost all credibility when you said to -O3 it...
You mean there is a closed-source SSH implementation?
I'd always thought OpenSSH on OpenBSD was the reference implementation. And anyway, when you're talking about any kind of security software, the ability to audit the Source Code should be the first item on your tick-list. If you don't know for sure what it's doing, it could be doing something nasty that you don't want; and security software would be the most obvious place to insert malware.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
CLFAGS JUST KICKED IN YO!
... it does help if the kernel and libc are well optimised, but extreme app optimisation is usually hardly noticeable. For the record, -Os is quite often better than -O3 these days because smaller code means more of it fits in cache, and modern CPUs are so fast that memory access tends to be a bottleneck. -funroll-loops is frequently recommended too but it's not magic, sometimes it's damaging because it makes the code bigger.
I run Gentoo myself but -O3 is largely pointless 99% of the time
My final year project as an undergrad was designing and implementing a protocol for roughly the same target as BitTorrent. BitTorrent started to become popular after I had begun working, and so I tried to compare my protocol to theirs for the final dissertation. It always amazed me that a protocol could become popular with no documentation; the only protocol documentation I could find was the (Python) code for the official client.
After finding out as much as I could about the protocol, it seemed like every time there was a design decision to be made, they picked the wrong one. The protocol has a staggering overhead, no possibility of adding multicast if it becomes widely deployed, and the out of band channels are designed in such a way as to make it trivial for anyone with a basic understanding of game theory to create a client that leaches a huge amount more than it uploads.
Hopefully this move will encourage the IETF to ratify a decent peer to peer protocol (have they even got a P2P WG yet?).
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
The type of sensationalism you'd expect from a lower class of blog than /.? I hate to be the one to spew clichés, but are you new here? Without sensationalism, how could the editors rile up the readership and create the discussion so needed for repeated page views and the advertising income so needed to pay for their hard, honest work?
a lot of people are using torrent though, so if BT inc starts doing protocol changes, they could potentially shatter the BT "community". We can only hope that, in case they do this, people won't cling on to t religiously but move to another client...
Coffee-driven development.
Actually, it does. E9M is a tiny company - I know specialist companies which deal with only one industry who make ten times that revenue.
In any case, you completely missed the context. Does SSH Inc. continue to set the standard? No. They are reduced to following the lead of OpenSSH, which is now the de-facto reference implementation after SSH Inc. went closed source. It doesn't make any difference whether they make E9M or E900M, they are still irrelevant in the context of being the reference implementation.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
No, FUD is when you blame a protocol or software for the way people are using them.
"TCP is used mostly for piracy." There. It's probably true, too. Kinda sounds silly when you pick on TCP, doesn't it, and yet so righteous when you pick on BT. Why is that?
Must be that whole OSI model nepotism thing, playing favorites with lower levels, damn you ISO!
i ate crayons when i was a kid and now i have two braincells and the blue ones taste nicer
Yes, but at least I know that Azureus isn't reporting what I'm downloading back to the mothership. You know, the same mothership that has signed deals with members of the MPAA.
Anybody using a closed source bittorrent client to do anything more aggressive then download a Linux distribution is insane, IMHO.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
if BT inc starts doing protocol changes, they could potentially shatter the BT "community"
That's only if there client had enough of a market-share to make the modified protocol the de-facto standard. If most people continue to use clients other than those owned by BitTorrent Inc. and trackers continue to work using the same protocol, it shouldn't matter what BitTorrent Inc. do to the protocol. That is as long as no one else follows lead.
Not all conservatives are stupid,
but it is true that most stupid people are conservative.
- Hume
One big problem with BitTorrent is that it isn't aware of the topology of the network, and so tends to use the most expensive bandwidth (e.g. transatlantic) in spite of the availability of cheaper alternatives. Home users don't care, because they pay a flat rate, but their ISPs do.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
They laughed at me on /. when I said some private trackers and some privacy enhancing IP block lists which are really concerned about privacy (not piracy essentially) started to block Bittorrent and uTorrent.
Please live with the fact that Bittorrent protocol started with good intentions but currently it is under real evil hands.
The "DHT" is the key. That is the primary concern of those "paranoids". When there is DHT involved, there is a central server. Excuse me if I trust to an open source client such as Azureus rather than some people acquired by billion dollar companies and still have face to beg for donation to my face on OS X acting like independent developers.
For the "open source" part, I wouldn't care less. Limewire is open source and even had face to bundle a "limeshop" control panel on OS X, yes, first actual Mac spyware until some "paranoids" started to flood forums with that fact and they pulled it from distro.