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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."
"There are two issues people need to come to grips with," BitTorrent CEO Ashwin Narvin told Slyck.com. "The genie is back in the bottle, and the cat is back in the bag."
Sorry, I just thought that was funny. If you RTFA, though, it sounds like the sky isn't falling just yet. The client, which was closed source before, is still free (as in free beer), and the protocol is available to anyone who asks for it.
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.
Video Production Support
Does anyone know how this will impact other open source clients such as Azureus?
Why aren't we told when editors moderate our posts?
.. 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.
Via Bittorrent.
What's the name going to be for the upcoming auto-encrypted open-sourced fork of Bittorrent?
Ryan Fenton
The article seems to be going in two or three different directions. I don't much care what happens to the "official BitTorrent client," be it what I downloaded the first time I tried BT, or the new Torrent incarnation.
I haven't used an official client in a very long time and I've never used Torrent. I use a client called "burst!" which hasn't been updated in more than a year. It works just fine for me right now, but I'm curious as to whether or not that's going to continue. I sense that the headline for this article is inflammatory, but if further development of BT clients is going to require an SDK license, is that going to lock out older open-source clients which are no longer being actively developed?
Thanks to the War on Drugs, it's easier to buy meth than it is to buy cold medicine!
Wouldn't it be great if someone could create some kind of license that allowed free access to the source code, but provided grounds to sue malicious companies that attempted to take that code and include it in closed source proprietary products without giving anything back to the community!
Oh, wait...
So I wonder how long it will be before the source is out on the Pirate Bay...
Try to hack my 31337 firewall!
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?
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.
Apparently the "u" that I copied out of charmap got swallowed by the lameness filter, or something. "Torrent incarnation" and "never used Torrent" should read "uTorrent incarnation" and "never used uTorrent," respectively.
Thanks to the War on Drugs, it's easier to buy meth than it is to buy cold medicine!
http://www.bittornado.com/
There, that should tide us over for a while.
"Welcome to obscurity, gentlemen. We hope you enjoy your stay. To ease your transition, we've assigned a personal guide for the both of you. Heidi, please call Mr. Fanning and let him know his group is here."
Please stand clear of the doors, por favor mantenganse alejado de las puertas
Isn't this what the GPL is for?
Help me take back Slashdot. When did 'News for Nerds' become 'FUD and Conspiracy Theories for Extremist Nutjobs'?
While the BitTorrent client and the latest protocol may not be published, therefore technically closed source, the protocol is still open. The details of the protocol extensions, including all the latest revisions, are still available to whoever wants them, providing they obtain the easily obtainable SDK license. BitTorrent's recent move isn't going to make everyone happy, but those wishing to help develop the BitTorrent community probably won't notice much of a difference.
Sure...okay. It's closed, but it's open. Sounds like a statement coming from a government bureaucrat. I guess I wasn't too far off. Software has too many licenses. I'm not about to pile this one on.
"C'est la Vie"
What?
New torrent alternative needs to distinguish phony crap and drm.
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." Slashdot editors, you are fucking retarded.
"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. ... As for the protocol itself, that too is closed, but is available by obtaining an SDK license."
The risks are great and I don't see a pay off.
As one person has already pointed out, too much of the wrong thing will isolate and destroy them
.Going non free will also make their problems worse. The malice described is a problem that free software creates. The only reason crackers and MAFIAA can get away with charging people for spyware derivatives is because Windoze and the clients are not free to begin with. Real free software can be packaged by distributions like Debian, which assure the user the software has been checked for malware by an impartial third party. The further away from that model they get, the more problems they will have. The dirtbags will go right along with what they are doing and their life will be easier.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
If they will give out sdk's as easy as they state then its not so bad. I know so many of my MS user friends always complain that there torrent programs are full of spyware etc...
Maybe this can shutdown some of these sketchy clients, and hopefully open alternatives can continue. Although I guess someone could just take the code from an open solution - maybe this just makes it a bit more difficult.
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?
There is a difference, here. uTorrent has always been closed, so it's not the client that's being closed. What people are or should be worried about are changes to the protocol. Hopefully, we won't see BitTorrent 6.0+ clients being blocked from trackers other than BitTorrent.com's tracker because of a silly change in the protocol that disrupts clients using v5 and earlier. Unfortunately, this means that if Bram, Ludde, and company engineer some wicked addition to the protocol that drastically improves it, the open source community will either 1) not have access to it or 2) have to reverse engineer it.
Additionally, only the main BitTorrent.com tracker would have access to tracker-side protocol updates. So, this then means that the only benefit of using the mainline client is when downloading from the BitTorrent.com tracker!
Is BitTorrent pigeonholing itself; is it forming its own niche within its once-large niche?
Colin Dean Go a year without DRM
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.
This is very off-topic, but, about your sig: The last time I clicked on a .cx link on Slashdot was a long time ago, and it's going to be a long time until I do it again...
-1 Troll? Moderators on crack. Parent is on point.
That my fellow community developers will take this opportunity to drop the BitTorrent protocol. Time to develop something better.
It's time we address it's critical failure... that you can see which IP's are trafficking in which files. There has to be an obscure way in which people can just exchange data blobs. Where the blobs are interleaved or multiplexed with data of other files and you don't know and can't know with all practicality what a particular blob contains until you finally collect enough blobs to reconstruct your data file. There are more blobs to be collected for a particular file for data redundancy but you only need to collect so many of them to recreate the data set. Meanwhile sure you downloaded more data then you needed to for that particular file but all the blobs you downloaded are still in demand from other people because of their relevance to other data sets. And you can safely continute to server those files because you don't necessarily know what multiplexed data they contain. Blobs also mutate and remix over time as to which combined data they contain.
From the article itself, it appears that, since acquiring uTorrent, a closed-source C++ BitTorrent client for Windows, Bittorrent, inc. has decided to keep it closed source, and also to make it the new "mainline" BitTorrent. The old "mainline" client, which is open-source, written in Python (with wx for the graphics) and is generally cross-platform, last I checked, will continue to be maintained as a "reference implementation", but might not always track the latest protocol updates to uTorrent. Full documentation on the protocol will apparently come with an "SDK license", which they claim is "easy to get".
Well, first of all they ARE doing a few things that contradict the spirit of free software. Their main client app will be closed source, and although the reference implementation will apparently continue to be free, protocol docs require you to acquire a special license. A few years ago, these moves would have tightened Bittorrent inc's grip on the world of bt clients in general.
Now, however, the landscape is different. I can't produce statistics for all torrent users in general, but when I take a look at my peers in my preferred client, KTorrent, there seems to be a near dead-heat for most popular client between uTorrent and Azureus (also open source), with certain alternative clients like Transmission, Bitrocket, and KTorrent making frequent appearances, as well (and all 3 of those examples? also open source). Although uTorrent certainly remains a big player, it doesn't confer upon BitTorrent, inc. the ability to dictate major compatibility-breaking protocol changes by fiat. The fact that the main implementation of BT was open source to start basically stops things from being ruined by more restrictive licensing now.
Anonymous Luddite: "What do you think of the dehumanizing effects of the Internet?"
Andy Grove: "Not Much."
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.
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.
AFAIK, if a protocol is not patented, the only protection available
is trade secret, which evaporates when published. I'm not sure they
can pull it back now.
It's similar to the reason you can't really protect the definition of a
programming language, even though lots of companies act like you can
and the industry largely plays along.
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
While we're at it, let's point out how wonderful some of those tags are.
This story is tagged "lame" and "bastards" among other things. So yeah, if I'm interested in looking up info on OSS software being closed, I'll be sure to look for articles tagged "lame". That imediately makes so much sense to me, and you guys clearly know what good tagging's all about. Tagging's a great way of expressing opinions on entire stories without having to own up to them. You don't even have to have to LEAVE A FUCKING COMMENT WITH A USER NAME.
C'mon, at least post AC, dickheads.
I don't therefore I'm not.
Probably. Everyone else has already figured out that it comes with spyware and violates the protocol and hammers trackers enough to get banned at all of the private trackers.
It's a sin to use anything except the latest Azureus, libtorrent, or uTorrent.
Although, apparently, soon it may be also a sin to use uTorrent since it's not Free.
grey wolf
LET FORTRAN DIE!
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!
Lets assume for a moment, that they decide to implement in Protocol v6 new ways to track you down. You wouldn't know that, since the protocol is close-sourced, would you?
Thats just one of many possible things that close-sourcing the application would do.
Check out Unsealed: Whispers of Wisdom! http://unsealed.k3rnel.net It's an action-RPG about Open Sourcerers.
probably. bitcomet is the same client without the ad-crap.
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.
Talk about closing the gate after the source has bolted!
Sorry about that. Truly, deeply sorry.
This guy probably thinks that computers are just for porn and that college is just for drinking.
They aren't??? It's not???
/. zen: Imagine a Beowulf cluster of Beowulf clusters...
Where can I find the .ryanfenton for the latest Heroes episode!!?!?111@!!
"There are two issues people need to come to grips with. 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."
People pay for repackaged malicious open source softare because they're used to proprietary software. They're used to a. pay (MS Office) b. see ads (Windows Live) and c. the closed nature of what runs on their hardware (IE, Ipods etc).
Open source does matter, even for people who are much too ignorant to actually realize it themselves; because it is part of the software culture and it directly and inevitably affects the user's approach to software in general. I can't believe a statement like the one above can pass as OK. And people just shrug and say "well Torrent was always closed anyway". Shame on you!
In related news, KTorrent just got even better.
> Q: How will this impact the BitTorrent open source development community as a whole?
A: Once word gets out about our RIAA backdoor, Azureus is going to kick our ass. Ummm... you better not print that.
To be honest, why would I care if they're "tracking me down" using torrents? The only things I use Bittorrent for are to download Linux ISOs and World of Warcraft updates (it's built into their updater).
But let's say someone out there is using Bittorrent to download stuff they're not supposed to. Why use a change in the protocol to monitor usage when big media can just force ISPs to open up their logs?
Back to the issue at hand: would I care if they monitored me? No.
Slashdot: Failed Car Analogies. Amateur Lawyering. Anecdote Battles.
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.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
I don't know, but I'll have a rye and fent on the rocks while I'm waiting...
yeah, you got me. looks like i'd better admit to the canonical team that i've been stealing their ubuntu images off the bittorrent links they so carelessly post on their main download pages.... shame on me...
My personal opinion, i know, but I think the fact that bittorrent was really the only open and functional protocol out there and hence why it rose to its supremacy. The only other thing that really set it apart in terms of functionality was the removal of the centralized distribution/search mechanism. But, I dont really believe the owners reasons tbh. "Some people are illegally redistributing my stuff", oh come on like thats a new state of affairs for anything.
You Maniacs! You blew it up! Ah, damn you! God damn you all to hell!
And that's only skimming your description.
Besides, not being able to preview files will pretty much make it useless for anything mainstream. Like pirating crap. So, if this protocol is never used for piracy, it will never need such insane protection from the MAFIAA because it will never blip on their radar. Oh, it can be used for other things, like downloading Linux ISOs? BT already does that. Secure file transfer? LOL Traffic analysis foiling? Tor. What else?
You are coming to a sad realization: Cancel or Allow?
Do not attribute to malice that which can be easily explained by incompetence.
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.
uTorrent is without a doubt the best Windows-only client, and it would hardly be a sin to use it. Hell, if you got it to run on Linux, you'd have the undying love of a few thousand people for a few days until someone else stole it. I share the sentiment of other posters when they say, "Who cares?" Mainline is pretty much irrelevant. If you want a good, Free client, you already know about Az.
Do not attribute to malice that which can be easily explained by incompetence.
Maybe the MAFIAA is behind this, secretly paying for the damage BitTorrent is doing to itself. BitTorrent could then make a new version that improves usability but also integrates copyright enforcement.
Just a paranoid conspiracy theory that is unlikely to be true.
"Screw Sun, cross-platform will never work. Let's move on and steal the Java language." - Visual J++ Product Manager
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..!).
They can't force my ISP; like almost half the world's population, I'm in Asia. They probably can't even communicate with my ISP.
However, if they change the protocol, they could stop me from using the client to exchange content they don't like.
Which is why I imagine that this half of the world's population will have little use for the Official Fork.
"Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it." -- GBS
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 liked KTorrent so much I made a donation to them. I thought I'd say "thanks" in a real and meaningful way.
One interesting thing I've seen is that when I look at the peers I'm connecting to, between 2-4% of them are also using KTorrent. Is this a genuine reflection of how many people are using it, or does KTorrent prefer to connect to other KTorrent clients, skewing the figures?
Its actually Ashwin Navin not Ashwin Narvin.
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)
"I like systems, their application excepted", George Sand (French)
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!
The music industry has tried the same with eDonkey. Now, noone uses eDonkey anymore and have switched to eMule of aMule. The same will happen here.
Funny, it has no noticeable impact on system performance on my two laptops. I've never seen it go above single digits. Are you sure there isn't something else holding it up and that is causing it to hog CPU cycles, like slow disk speed?
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
Because that post deserves it.
The argumentation is too good for "flamebait" or "troll", but the uncivilized attacks on GP still deserve a whacking...
C - the footgun of programming languages
What a clever move. If I had a successful software protocol up my sleeve, with strong replication authority (ie: what we do, everyone else does), that relies on other clients to maintain the network: i would seriously rethinking pushing them out.
If you think about it, that statement really isn't saying much. I mean, sure they'll keep it under an open source license, and they may even fix bugs in it - but they haven't promised to, say, port new protocol features they've added in their closed source client to it.
Actually, hxnwix, you are the one who's "fucking retarded", since the quote in question is from a FAQ written in December 2006, back when BitTorrent originally acquired uTorrent, and TFA makes this quite clear.
uTorrent is so lightweight that I've left it running in the background and edited video with After Effects and Premiere without noticing.
You are welcome on my lawn.
But contributions from other authors are the copyright of those other authors.
So to take a GPL project to closed-source, all contributors with code in the now-closed source would need to agree, right?
As stated in the summary, details of the protocol is available for those who ask for it. It has not been closed completely. I would also imagine that any changes to the protocol would be communicated to the developer teams of the other main clients.
All very well applying for SDK documentation for the protocol specs, but I'm guessing you can't then expose that documentation to other developers, which just isn't really OSS.
I just downloaded the official client for the MMO Granado Espada: Sword of the New World using their torrent. Max'd out the 5M cable at 580+. I prefer it over web-download, because I can throttle the speeds of it, and the porn I'm uploading to maintain my ratio on that, and still do whatever I like. I have no need for the clunkiness of a "download manager".
Don't worry if you're a kleptomaniac, you can always take something for it.
More exactly, X.org was built on the last GPLed version of XFree86. So this is a classic fork where some people take advantage of the Free Software License and build their own stuff.
C - the footgun of programming languages
Which is why all new development will be added to the uTorrent tree (which has always been closed source), not to the historical bittorrent tree.
You must be new here
"Evil will always triumph over good, because good is dumb." - Dark Helmet (Spaceballs)
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
Microsoft doesn't seem to think so.
Slight correction: BitComet is a much newer code base and also without the ad-crap. See: Bitlord.
There is a commercial bittorrent? I didn't even know that. Who cares? There are probably a hundred open source implementations of the protocol. If a commercial company decides to fork the protocol in an incompatible way, will anyone care? Will anyone use their product if nobody can connect to it?
You misspelled fork.
uTorrent is so lightweight that I've left it running in the background and downloaded After Effects and Premiere without noticing.
XFree86 was never GPL. It was MIT-licensed.
Fuck off to rtorrent or ktorrent?
Bit torrent have made a closed source client their mainline client, and have decided to fortify their rights to the protocol too (its closed, but an SDK can be requested).
Correction -- their SDK can be *paid for*.
I beginning to think that the whole point of acquiring the most popular closed source client was to allow them to close and charge for the SDK. The counterpoint to this argument is that if any one open source P2P grits it teeth and pays whatever fee they're going to charge open source clients, then their implementation becomes the new reference.
A lot of people here are talking about how the Mainline client has once again aggressively pursued irrelevance, but uTorrent's marketshare is going to be nigh impossible to unseat unless they do something self-destructive like removing a popular feature they don't like (like encrpytion). They have a really good chance of dictating the development of the future of the protocol with that client in hand.
I think that this finally explains the reason for the buy-out and the lack of open source. I had previously thought it was due to uTorrent's original developer's dislike of open source, but it may have more to do with control and with monetizing the SDK.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Are you retarded? Do you not know what BitTorrent is even for? How could the public fall for such a thing?? What?? BitTorrent is something the entire industry should be switching to.
If you want to see where this may be headed, take a look at the DirectConnect situation, or many other popular P2P protocols.
DC is also a popular P2P protocol and it started as a closed application whose protocol was reverse engineered. Later attempts to retake control were futile and nowadays there's no such thing as an "official" DC protocol, only several different client software making it on sheer popularity. Just like BT, some of them add new features and sometimes they're borrowed by the others and so on.
Think of IRC too. It also doesn't have an "official" specification, there are all these servers and clients and so on. At least there were some RFC's at some point, which is more than can be said of other P2P protocols.
So it seems to be a "normal" situation with P2P to not have a standard protocol and for it to evolve on server/client software popularity alone.
i ate crayons when i was a kid and now i have two braincells and the blue ones taste nicer
Which also requires the uTorrent tree to contain no code from the open tree written by someone who doesn't want uTorrent to go closed source, I suppose. So even though bittorrent was open source, perhaps it had little community involvement. Or perhaps uTorrent is completely written from scratch, but this seems unlikely.
Since when did Debian care if protocols were complete and open source? They certainly take samba.
Throw the bums out!
He is right. As a user, you don't see the mechanism behind the P2P client. eMule is simpler and more intuitive than a BitTorrent client.
AFAIK that is perfectly legal and compatible with the GPL. Open source doesn't necessarily also mean free of charge. Think RHEL. You may charge for it but you still have to distribute the source code.
The torrent guys are complaining that people are using their software in ways other than they'd like. Bitter and yet somehow appropriate, one thinks.
StoneCypher is Full of BS
To err is human; effective mayhem requires the root password!
I pasted text from the article. That text may have been a quote from somewhere else - nevertheless, it appears in the article. How is this hard to understand? You would know that it isn't, if, well...
There are other protocols already that do what Bittorrent does, some are even better. If the protocol isn't open then why support yet another evil corporation? Move along and let them drown.
At best, all they are doing is making themselves useless, and possibly a target for the lawyers who want to sue them for facilitating piracy, I know thats far fetched, but its not like a protocol/service hasn't been attacked for it before.
Deep packet inspection is going to be a BitTorrent killer for most people soon anyway. Unless the goverment steps in and stops providers from controlling bandwidth based on application type, the bittorrent protocol will is easy enough to detect and limit or stop completely, even with its current 'encryption' due to stupid implementation.
Whats likely to happen is a new, far more efficient, entirely encrypted (and by this I mean to the point that deep packet inspection won't be able to tell wtf it is) protocol will be developed by some other enterprising developer/group of developers in their moms basement who are bored one friday night waitting on their real doll to inflate. I've considered it myself, but I got the high speed pump.
Current bittorrent clients will start supporting the new protocol as well as bittorrent, and the current bittorrent protocol will fade away. The broadband providers will realize the money the spent on hardware and software for deep packet inspection is now almost entirely useless for anything more than wiretapping garbled data. And software distribution, be it legal or not, will hardly notice the bump in the road.
About the most the BitTorrent, Inc is likely to get out of this is possibly a reference in some computer science or business management text book 10 years down the road. As an example of how to make your company suddenly cease to matter in the software world.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
That pretty much seals the fate for the 'official' BT. So long and thanks for all the fish.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Think about it, this sounds a whole lot like some Microsoft deals in the past. They'll maintain a "free open source reference implementation", rewrite an entirely new protocol that's incompatible with the old one, and then announce that the reference is "obsolete, out of date, and worthless". Of course, considering the number of clients available and the irrelevance of the mainline client, it probably won't work. Doesn't mean they can't/won't try though.
and.... slower? dependent on a centralized server base?
That's completely unfounded speculation. SCO said the same thing about the Linux kernel, too, and we know how that turned out.
The road to tyranny has always been paved with claims of necessity.
The GP is clearly uninformed, giving an useless opinion.
And, yes, knowing about multicast is important (even if not widely used at WANs). And not knowing about it is a simptom a a much bigger flaw on understanding the internet.
Rethinking email
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
"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 a company that distributes a free product, no one should ever have to pay for the BitTorrent client. Ashwin told Slyck.com that by keeping the source closed, it creates a "certain amount of distinction" between the official client and maliciously repackaged software."
I call bullshit. This is the usual excuse when closing source - "Gee, somebody else will screw our customers - so we better screw them first."
MySQL is now limiting its Enterprise source code to paying customers. Now they are doing this to make the distinction clear between their Enterprise product and the Community product. I understand that move. And since the source code is still available (both from MySQL to their paying customers and from anyone else who got the product under the GPL), this is no real problem.
But claiming you have to close the source because somebody will take your OSS product and distribute it maliciously is just plain bullshit.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
Samba is open, it is based on reverse engineering of the SMB NMB CIFS protocol accretum. See: http://us4.samba.org/samba/docs/SambaIntro.html gg nm.
Before I delve into twitter's checkered past, I'm actually curious as to where in my post you consider I was uncivilized?
Similarly, I've been able to play WoW without any noticable slowdowns with Azureus running in the background on my macbook. I preferred uTorrent on my windows box before I switched to the macbook, but Azureus has been good enough that I haven't been really tempted to look for other alternatives.
meh
Do not attribute to malice that which can be easily explained by incompetence.
Someone grab it quick! BT is going the way of SSH/OpenSSH.
I don't mind the occasional swear word, but when you call people "retards" for modding up something you don't like, that is not a constructive way of discussion. Civilized people can refute the other guy's arguments without insults.
C - the footgun of programming languages
Oops I modded this over-rated by accident; posting to undo it. Someone mod this funny.
Nobody actually uses RTF or cares about it...
> So it seems to be a "normal" situation with P2P to not have a standard protocol and for it to evolve on server/client software popularity alone.
That's largely the case with IRC these days too. The protocol in the RFC will still work, but everything since has been done with largely undocumented hacked-up extensions. I call it an "oral tradition".
Done with slashdot, done with nerds, getting a life.
Come up with a "new" protocol and call it tnerroT.
That value includes the disk caching done be the kernel on behalf of the process. It isn't actually holding that much memory.
Not half as important as knowing how to spell and write in sentences.
my password really is 'stinkypants'
Yes, it's a quote that's in the article, and if you'd read my comment more carefully you would spot that I wasn't disputing that. The thing is, the article quotes that to show how the reassurances BitTorrent Inc gave when they originally acquired uTorrent. What they're saying now is subtly different - basically, the open source version is less of a "preeminent reference implementation" and more something they'll keep around, but which may not be up to date or as complete as the closed source one. (Ashwin Navin may refer to the relevant FAQ entry as "a true statement", but it looks like he's reinterpreting it in an interesting fashion in order to do so.)
utorrent has _never_ phoned home.
Otoh, some builds of azareus DID phone home, GPL be dammed.
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
Having said that, I recognize that Slashdot is a shared resource and neither you nor anyone else should be subjected to what I say or do (or anybody else's peculiar crap for that matter), so for that I apologize. I don't mean to sound sarcastic here, but since I'm not really going to stop the only option I can suggest is for you to mark me as 'Foe' and remove me from your comment view.
Either way, thanks for your comment, and my apologies again.
That sounds reasonable. My non-asshole take is that they're thinking two half measures add up to open source. (obsolete source + easily licensable SDK = open) If this is all really just a way to give BT leverage against malware authors and scammers who incorporate torrent functionality in their stuff, they might not be too far off the mark, although open source hardliners would certainly disagree...
And possibly for pragmatic reasons. I think that if uTorrent to advances while the rest of the field stagnates and grows less and less compatible, it will become a single point of failure upon which the media companies will focus their hungry lawyers and dirty tricksters.
BT might want to take a page from eMule's playbook and remember the fates of Napster, Kazaa, etc... The same holds true for the SDK itself; at the very least, the licenses for both hopefully contain spicy-pill provisions that activate by default to release the whole enchilada & all associated burritos into the wild in the case of BT's bankruptcy and in other adverse circumstances. Just my 2c.
Here's some of that background I was referring to, FWIW.
Hmm, I found it not that annoying. Does not deserve an "insightful" of course but I might grant him a "funny". Then again, I understand that not everyone does enjoy that sort of crude humour...
C - the footgun of programming languages