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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 company that owns the BitTorrent trademark is not the arbiter of the protocol or anything else. Do they even own that trademark?
Note that they opposed the addition of encryption, and they were completely ignored. BitTorrent, the company, is entirely irrelevant.
> Yes - they're maintaining the Open Source client... with a protocol that they hint they will be leaving behind.
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?
At this point someone simply needs to write up a formal documentation of the protocol as it currently exists and submit it to the W3C, at which point the wire protocol is pretty much settled. And go ahead and pick a new anme because you can bet your last dollar they will pull the trademark crap the second they realize they are being written out of the picture.
Democrat delenda est
It's still a matter of what you, as a developer, can do with the protocol. Obviously, part of the SDK licensing agreement will be that you can't just publish it for the world to see, or be allowed to incorporate it into an open source project (or probably even a third party closed source project).
eclecti.cc
People use Bittorrent -- or more specifically, many people use uTorrent -- to connect to public BT trackers and to other people running similar client programs. Bittorrent (the company) doesn't control either. In fact, I don't think that Bittorrent-the-company's "reference implementation" is particularly popular for trackers, and they're really where the marketshare matters.
I don't think that the majority of bittorent (the protocol) users are just going to bend over and throw away the software that they've liked, just because Bittorrent (the company) decides it would be cool to produce a new, ad-laden, DRM-using, Hollywood-mogul-approved version of their software, that breaks compatibility with older versions. In fact, I strongly suspect that the trackers which drive the more popular torrent aggregation sites would refuse to recognize such a "broken" implementation, and would instead favor free implementations (old versions of uTorrent, Azureus, etc.).
What's happening here is that Bittorrent (the company) has become fully decoupled from bittorrent (the protocol). They have very little leverage over the latter; about all they have is the rights to the name "Bittorrent," and the 'reference implementation,' which won't be worth its weight in electrons once they start messing with it.
The comparisons to Microsoft and RTF aren't really apt, because Microsoft had a way they could easily control the format -- they just made future versions of Word produce output that was incompatible with other vendors' software. But Bittorrent can't really do that, because a bittorrent client is only useful insofar as it can communicate with the swarm. As long as the trackers that drive the most popular torrents (which, let's face it, are the illegal ones; warez and movies) don't start using the new/broken protocols, it seems unlikely that a broken protocol would gain traction.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Seems like this'll only split the bittorrent protocol, there's a fairly wide variety of clients out there and the only thing that held them together was the official protocol. Azureus has been making small breaks even with the official protocol around, so now it'll probably split. The question is which client will the other ones follow, now that BitTorrent have given up their niche in true XFree86 style.
// MD_Update(&m,buf,j);
I gotta say, as clunky as Azureus has been, they've obviously been working hard on the thing, because it works so much more smoothly now. Even with a few torrents running, I don't get huge CPU grabs like I used to, and the overall feel of speed is definitely improved.
Linux, you magnificent bastard, I read the fucking manual!