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

Not RTFA? Read this at least.

[tonsofpcs]

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.

Re:Not RTFA? Read this at least.

[PaintyThePirate]

Not exactly. The only mention of an SDK on the Bittorrent site is part of a "device certification program", that would undoubtedly involve paying Bittorrent in exchange for licensing their now proprietary information and some offical seal of approval. There is no mention of open source projects being able to see/use any changes in the protocol. Luckily, I assume that most bittorrent trackers (public or private), will ban any incompatible official client if the protocol does change, rather than adopting the official client and abandoning all of the others.

Re:Not RTFA? Read this at least.

[Firehed]

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.

Re:Not RTFA? Read this at least.

[appleLaserWriter]

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.

No, you completely misunderstand, Bittorrent's management are absolutely brilliant. If they keep bittorrent open source, then it's impossible to pirate. By "closing" it, they are actually making it possible for people to get bittorrent as god intended. By pirating it.

It was only a matter of time..

[LingNoi]

.. 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.

Re:It was only a matter of time..

[_Sprocket_]

RTFA. They aren't closing the source, they are purchasing uTorrent and keeping uTorrent's source closed. They will still be releasing an SDK. They will still support the old client. They're just moving on to work on a closed source project. Sure they're releasing a SDK... but under what license? Yes - they're maintaining the Open Source client... with a protocol that they hint they will be leaving behind. Want to keep up? Get the SDK. Again - under what license?

No. It doesn't sound like business as usual to me.

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:It was only a matter of time..

[kripkenstein]

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?

No, that isn't quite true.

First, Bittorrent is a peer-to-peer protocol. Only a minor part of it is communication with the server (aka tracker). They might keep the tracker protocol exactly the same, and alter the important p2p part.

Second, this has already been done, and successfully. For example, utorrent came out with a 'PEX' (Peer Exchange) protocol that wasn't in the spec. So it was only used between peers that were both using the utorrent client. This provided a nicer bittorrent experience for utorrent users, especially as utorrent's marketshare rose. Later on, because of utorrent's dominant position, other clients started to implement utorrent PEX (KTorrent, libtorrent-based clients), with varying degrees of success.

A similar issue is Azureus's DHT protocol, which is not in the standard. Although at least Azureus is open source, so you can read the actual code to help in understanding what nonstandard protocols they have invented (but then they also have a very nice wiki).

The point is, it is easy to 'embrace and extend' the bittorrent protocol, even if you don't have control of the servers. Is 'extinguish' next? Probably not, but I for one won't be using the official Bittorrent client.

Re:It was only a matter of time..

[SolitaryMan]

Malicious software re-packaging is a lame excuse too.

This excuse is exactly what pisses me off the most. I mean, you want to close the source? Fine, just don't act like you're "doing it for the children".

If only...

[Anonymous Coward]

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...

Re:If only...

[ScrewMaster]

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.

Re:other open source clients?

[ScrewMaster]

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.

So....

[Mr. Flibble]

So I wonder how long it will be before the source is out on the Pirate Bay...

Re:In related news...

[Anonymous Coward]

And uTorrent belongs to Bittorrent(company) and always has been closed source.

Re:other open source clients?

[gujo-odori]

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.

Re:So....

[MalusCaelestis]

Ryan Fenton? That's a strange name for a protocol...

rtorrent pwnz

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:What's the negative of closed source in this ca

[k3vlar]

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.

Must ... resist ... pun ... can't ...

[Mind Socket]

Talk about closing the gate after the source has bolted!

Sorry about that. Truly, deeply sorry.

Done and done!

[Anonymous Coward]

Where can I find the .ryanfenton for the latest Heroes episode!!?!?111@!!

Looking forward to spending more time with family

[BillGatesLoveChild]

> 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.

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.

What am i missing

[KevMar]

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.

Re:In related news...

[TheRaven64]

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?).

Re:In related news...

[Shakrai]

I go as far as to run it in WINE and it's still slicker than Azureus

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.