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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.
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.
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.
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?
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!
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.
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
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.