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

Re:It was only a matter of time..

[jmorris42]

> 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.

Re:It was only a matter of time..

[_Sprocket_]

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. There seems to be echoes of SSH in this story. Granted - the history of SSH involves some distinct differences (for example, Tatu Ylönen submitted SSH to the IETF as a standard which set the grounds for "SSH" becoming hard to restrict despite SSH,Inc.'s annoyance at the "OpenSSH" name). But one can't help to wonder if this will pan out the same way; the last BitTorrent OSS release becoming a springboard for continued development that competes if not completely overshadows the originator's own efforts.

Re:other open source clients?

[Kadin2048]

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. They have a monopoly ... how, exactly?

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.