This is essentially a story about the last time Slashdot posted a story about this.
The only addition is the false quote from Linus, I think it is pretty unforgivable that CowboyNeal would put a deliberately false quote in the blurb of a story, but its not surprising given that slashdot editors really don't appear to give a flying fuck any more (even after I sent an email to the "on duty editor" after seeing this in the "mysterious future").
Now, don't get me wrong...I'm all about the free speech...but this sort of thing simply doesn't deserve the same sort of protection that journalists receive.
And who sits in judgement of what speech is and isn't worthy of protection? You perhaps? That isn't free speech.
Then, while a temporary cease-fire is arranged so that the matter can be discussed and resolved maturely, he violates this truce.
I have seen no evidence that Tridge ever agreed to this "truce", and if not, how could he possibly violate a truce that he never agreed to?
I have also seen no reason to suggest that Tridge cannot be trusted when he claims that he didn't use BitKeeper, and since Tridge is the free software developer in this debate, I am more inclined towards sympathy with him than towards a guy that thinks reverse engineering for interoperability is immoral.
I know that it's heresy to say this on slashdot, but it sounds like things were running pretty fine until rabid open-source zealotry reared its ugly head.
I see nothing ugly about a guy's desire to use free software, and to put the work in to make it happen, in fact it is exactly the spirit that drives the free software movement.
On the other hand, I see plenty that is ugly about BitMover trying to impose the terms of their license on a guy who apparently didn't even use their software to build a free replacement for it.
No, but if you _host_ a site on Microsoft IIS, you must agree to the license...
Yeah, and if you RTFA you will notice that Tridge didn't use BitKeeper:
I did not use BitKeeper at all in writing this tool and thus was never subject to the BitKeeper license. I developed the tool in a completely ethical and legal manner.
Why not just write a free alternative if Tridge is so concerned about non-free tools?
Because Linus was using BitKeeper, to work on the kernel without using non-free tools he had no choice but to reverse BitKeeper's protocol (or get Linus to change tools, which seems to be what is happening now anyway).
Please don't buy into the double-think that ideas are property, the two concepts have almost nothing in common. Thomas Jefferson said it best:
He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.
Boy, I hate to say it, but whenever somebody "defers" on defending themself, it sure looks like they have something to hide
Huh? The fact that he didn't use BitKeeper to do this and therefore there is no question of him being bound by its license is ample "defense" in itself, as if any "defense" should be needed for reverse engineering.
Please lets get this straight - there is nothing immoral about reverse engineering, particularly in the interests of interoperability as seems to be the case here.
Its sad to see people put celebrity before principal, if this were Microsoft making these arguments against Samba, rather than Linus' friend making them against this Tridge guy, there would be no question as to which side most slashdotters would come down on.
The principal doesn't change just because the people in question claim to be friends of free software.
The crux of the issue is that BitKeeper's CEO, Larry McVoy, has a big problem with reverse engineering, he considers it immoral. Personally I think
that reverse engineering is entirely legitimate, people have been building on each-other's ideas since ever, and I am sure BitKeeper wasn't created in a vacuum either. You borrow from the collective commons of ideas, but in return you must give back too.
Reverse engineering is particularly warrented for the purposes of interoperability, and this seems to have been the motivation of Andrew "Tridge"
Tridgell. He wasn't reverse engineering BitKeeper to "steal" McVoy's ideas, he was doing it so that he could gain access to the
Linux kernel without using non-free tools. McVoy's position is one that you might expect from Microsoft on Samba, but not from someone that claims to support the
ideals of free software.
Bottom line? I'm with Tridge on this one, McVoy is wrong, what he wants and seems to expect is effectively patent-level protection of his ideas.
Wrong. In a multi-person conference, one computer is elected as the "central hub", that relies all communication to the other parties
Yes, and the "central hub" is the transmitter. All you are saying is that rather than the broadcaster using all their bandwidth, they offload this work onto one of their unsuspecting listeners. It doesn't solve the problem, it just moves it to some other poor sap.
The point remains that Skype is extremely unsuited to broadcasting.
But skype is p2p, so that instead of you streaming directly to your audience, listeners may stream from you AND some other listeners, obviously minimizing the bandwidth required of the originator.
I know how Skype works, and it does not do this. It may be P2P in the way that it finds when users are online, but conference calls are one-to-many, just like Icecast. This is why, last time I checked, Skype must limit conference calls to at most 4 participants.
PeerCast does try to do what you describe, but last time I checked it didn't do a very good job of it.
Maybe the average user does not know anything about Icecast?
Have you seen their instructions for doing this? It is far from straightfoward for the average user. In contrast, I believe this is trivially easy to do with WinAmp.
Could be. But the arcticle says this: "Skype's peer-to-peer infrastructure--similar in construct to Kazaa, Morpheus and other file-swapping programs--makes it well-suited for turning Net phones into a broadcasting system".
That is completely wrong, either a wilful lie or this person doesn't know what they are talking about. I know a bit about how Skype works, and it is very poorly suited to broadcasting. Every listener requires that the transmitter sends a new stream across their Internet connection.
What is the point of this? Skype's codec is optomised for voice, not audio. There are perfectly good open source tools like Icecast which have been around for years and which work with codecs designed for music. I also doubt Skype will scale up to be able to support more than a small number of listeners at a time.
This sounds like some marketing droid at Skype trying to invent a phenomenon by pretending that it already exists.
I am the CEO of a software development company and I have personally been forced to decide to keep my company from innovating in particular software markets due to patents on obvious techniques (*cough* Acacia *cough*), not because these patents would survive a court challenge, but because we couldn't risk going to court in the first place with such a well-funded adversary. My point is that the harm is very real and it is starting to touch the activities of many many software engineers.
Maybe I was a little ambitious with the use of the term FUD but I stand by everything I said. Yes, patents are a rich man's game. That's part of the cost of doing business in the US.
But don't you see that this is the crux of the matter? Getting dragged into court just for trying to innovate shouldn't be a cost of doing business in the US any more than getting dragged before the Spanish inquisition should have been a cost of doing science in the middle ages.
The fact that it is a cost of doing business is a failure of patent law to meet its constitutional mandate to further the progress of science and it is and will continute to hold back innovation in the US and other countries where patents on software are permitted.
Software doesn't need patents, copyright provides ample motivation to software developers. The only people I know that have sought software patents only even thought of doing it after they had developed their "invention", thus the patent did not serve as a motivating factor for them, meaning society suffered the cost of the patent monopoly with no benefit in return. In my experience this is always the case with software patents.
Yup, like I said - a childish hissy fit, they are taking their ball and going home because OSDL wouldn't put pressure on some contractor to limit his spare time closed source activities.
Hopefully this will encourage development of a free (as in speech) alternative to BitKeeper.
How has this left Linux out in the cold? Because he now has to pay to use BitKeeper? What's wrong with that?
Because people were encouraged to rely on BitKeeper on the basis that it was free as in beer, but now it isn't, and migrating to an alternative will undoubtedly be a major burden for the Linux development process.
Wow, non-free software vendor decides to drop support for a piece of software leaving their loyal users out in the cold. Thanks BitMover for proving why Linus' decision to rely on a non-free version control system was a mistake.
Having quickly read the RTFA, it looks like the motivation behind BitMover's hissy-fit was that a contractor of OSDL was working on reverse engineering BitKeeper's protocol in his spare time, and OSDL must have refused to, or failed to make him to stop (ouch, threatening someone's job to make them stop doing open source in their spare time, not cool!). BitMover's CEO claims to be on the side of open source, yet last time I checked interoperability was a good thing, and reverse engineering was a legitimate way to achieve it. Not according to CEO Larry McVoy, to him reverse engineering is evil, and those that do it are "bad apples" that should be punished by the rest of the open source movement.
Of course, lots of this is my own suppositions based on reading between the lines of the article, I am sure if I have got anything wrong people will be quick to correct me.
Slashdot Mirror
The only addition is the false quote from Linus, I think it is pretty unforgivable that CowboyNeal would put a deliberately false quote in the blurb of a story, but its not surprising given that slashdot editors really don't appear to give a flying fuck any more (even after I sent an email to the "on duty editor" after seeing this in the "mysterious future").
I have also seen no reason to suggest that Tridge cannot be trusted when he claims that he didn't use BitKeeper, and since Tridge is the free software developer in this debate, I am more inclined towards sympathy with him than towards a guy that thinks reverse engineering for interoperability is immoral.
On the other hand, I see plenty that is ugly about BitMover trying to impose the terms of their license on a guy who apparently didn't even use their software to build a free replacement for it.
Wow, I had better call my lawyer next time I decide to surf the web!
Please lets get this straight - there is nothing immoral about reverse engineering, particularly in the interests of interoperability as seems to be the case here.
Its sad to see people put celebrity before principal, if this were Microsoft making these arguments against Samba, rather than Linus' friend making them against this Tridge guy, there would be no question as to which side most slashdotters would come down on.
The principal doesn't change just because the people in question claim to be friends of free software.
Reverse engineering is particularly warrented for the purposes of interoperability, and this seems to have been the motivation of Andrew "Tridge" Tridgell. He wasn't reverse engineering BitKeeper to "steal" McVoy's ideas, he was doing it so that he could gain access to the Linux kernel without using non-free tools. McVoy's position is one that you might expect from Microsoft on Samba, but not from someone that claims to support the ideals of free software.
Bottom line? I'm with Tridge on this one, McVoy is wrong, what he wants and seems to expect is effectively patent-level protection of his ideas.
The point remains that Skype is extremely unsuited to broadcasting.
PeerCast does try to do what you describe, but last time I checked it didn't do a very good job of it.
This sounds like some marketing droid at Skype trying to invent a phenomenon by pretending that it already exists.
The fact that it is a cost of doing business is a failure of patent law to meet its constitutional mandate to further the progress of science and it is and will continute to hold back innovation in the US and other countries where patents on software are permitted.
Software doesn't need patents, copyright provides ample motivation to software developers. The only people I know that have sought software patents only even thought of doing it after they had developed their "invention", thus the patent did not serve as a motivating factor for them, meaning society suffered the cost of the patent monopoly with no benefit in return. In my experience this is always the case with software patents.
...let the guys who did this movie do Transformers!
Hopefully this will encourage development of a free (as in speech) alternative to BitKeeper.
You hit the nail on the head. Now I wish someone would mod my comment down a bit, this one deserves to be higher up on the page :-)
Having quickly read the RTFA, it looks like the motivation behind BitMover's hissy-fit was that a contractor of OSDL was working on reverse engineering BitKeeper's protocol in his spare time, and OSDL must have refused to, or failed to make him to stop (ouch, threatening someone's job to make them stop doing open source in their spare time, not cool!). BitMover's CEO claims to be on the side of open source, yet last time I checked interoperability was a good thing, and reverse engineering was a legitimate way to achieve it. Not according to CEO Larry McVoy, to him reverse engineering is evil, and those that do it are "bad apples" that should be punished by the rest of the open source movement.
Of course, lots of this is my own suppositions based on reading between the lines of the article, I am sure if I have got anything wrong people will be quick to correct me.