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."
"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
.. 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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
"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
Ryan Fenton? That's a strange name for a protocol...
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...
The GPL cannot keep the original author from changing the license and closing the source nor can it prevent the protocol from being closed either.
The only thing it can do is keep that source (the version that was under the GPL) available to the open-source community. Which, btw, can be accomplished by any other open-source license. Btw, they have already done this.
Basically, we're in the exact same situation now that we would have been if it was GPL'd.
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!
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.
OpenRyanFentonKabuke.
And rather than going from version 0.9 to version 1.0, it will go from 0.9 towards 0.9.1.16rc(NaN-Inf) without ever getting to 1.0. Just you wait...
I don't therefore I'm not.
Where can I find the .ryanfenton for the latest Heroes episode!!?!?111@!!
> 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.
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.
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."
-Bittorrent creates a new protocol (I'll call it 'bt2') that is completely incompatible with bittorrent as it currently stands. The new protocol offers heavy-duty user authentication and encryption, and is basically designed to distribute pay-to-watch Hollywood movies, in order to save the studios from actually paying their own bandwidth bills.
-Bittorrent "updates" uTorrent to use the new bt2 protocol, although it would probably be more of a complete rewrite. They ignore the old open-source 'reference implementation,' announce that it's deprecated, and try to get everyone to download the new client.
-People running porn/warez/movies trackers do nothing, keep running the tracker software that they're using right now.
-Some idiot users will undoubtedly go and download the "new and improved" uTorrent, fire it up, and realize that they can't connect to anything, and the
-Users delete new uTorrent, go back to old version, or get Azureus instead.
Going forward, I think that what'll happen is there there will either be a complete fork, with Bittorrent splitting completely from the mainstream community and producing a client that's used only for commercial applications (distributing movies, etc.), and which can't connect to most non-commercial trackers, or they will continue to produce uTorrent and try to play both sides of the street with it: connecting via the new protocol to commercial trackers for pay-to-watch content and the regular protocol to all other trackers so that it doesn't get totally ignored by users.
However, this puts Bittorrent in the unenviable position of having to constantly keep up with the OSS side of things, and doesn't really threaten the openness of the protocol. Any way you cut it, they're going to be following, not leading.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
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
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!