BitTorrent Closes Source Code 390
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."
In related news... (Score:5, Funny)
"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.
Re:In related news... (Score:5, Insightful)
BitTorrent/Bram just sealed a casket. Charging for a protocol is like charging for TCP. And with Azureus Vuze and mldonkey out there who cares.
There is room in this world for basically Microsoft and maybe IBM to charge for "protocols," (like the ability to stream WMV and play it), but to open and then close = fork and die.
That Ashwin guy is a rug-merchant type, he knows how to wheel and deal and do the CEO thing, but I think he doesn't get why his company isn't a commercial success, and closing the source code isn't going make commercial miracles happen - this is like a fish flopping around on the deck of a fishing troller. . To throw is words back at him, a bottled genie cant grant wishes.
You think the content companies, and Yahoo, and all the other people trying to trickle-channel or channel media with P2P don't have the specs for a protocol like this? What would prevent them from DIY rather than pay BT? Nothing.
Re:In related news... (Score:5, Insightful)
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... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:In related news... (Score:4, Informative)
http://wiki.theory.org/BitTorrentSpecification [theory.org]
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:In related news... (Score:4, Interesting)
Sorry to ruin it for you, but if you don't even know what that means, you're not in a position of judging *any* protocol.
Another hint for you: Just because it seems to work well for you on a small scale doesn't mean it is a good protocol (i.e. scaling well, little overhead, easily extendable, etc.).
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:In related news... (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:In related news... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:In related news... (Score:4, Informative)
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).
Not only is this a non-issue, but its the type of sensationalism I would expect from a lot lower class of blog than
Re:In related news... (Score:5, Insightful)
Monetizing the SDK (Score:3, Interesting)
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, the
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
That's only if there client had enough of a market-share to make the modified protocol the de-facto standard. If most people continue to use clients other than those owned by BitTorrent Inc. and trackers continue to work using the same protocol, it shouldn't matter what BitTorrent Inc. do to the protocol. That is as long as no one else follows lead.
rtorrent pwnz (Score:5, Informative)
http://libtorrent.rakshasa.no/ [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: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:rtorrent pwnz (Score:4, Insightful)
I run Gentoo myself but -O3 is largely pointless 99% of the time
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
What someone needs to do is set up an automated build system that uses "-fprofile-generate/-fprofile-use" -- es
KTorrent (Score:5, Informative)
I've also dabbled with mldonkey and shareaza as more multi-purpose p2p apps that also support torrents.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:KTorrent too CPU hungry (Score:5, Interesting)
Surely, you mean... (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Oxymoronic: thief cries thief !! (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Oxymoronic: thief cries thief !! (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
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
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
They aren't??? It's not???
Not RTFA? Read this at least. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Not RTFA? Read this at least. (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Not RTFA? Read this at least. (Score:4, Informative)
However this will not be the case, Ashwin told Slyck.com. 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.
"I don't think we've ever said no" to an aspiring BitTorrent programmer, Ashwin said.
Re:Not RTFA? Read this at least. (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, fuck them.
Re:Not RTFA? Read this at least. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Not RTFA? Read this at least. (Score:5, Insightful)
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: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Not RTFA? Read this at least. (Score:4, Interesting)
That's certainly all I use it for.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
No, FUD is when you blame a protocol or software for the way people are using them.
"TCP is used mostly for piracy." There. It's probably true, too. Kinda sounds silly when you pick on TCP, doesn't it, and yet so righteous when you pick on BT. Why is that?
Must be that whole OSI model nepotism thing, playing favorites with lower levels, damn you ISO!
Re:Not RTFA? Read this at least. (Score:5, Funny)
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.
other open source clients? (Score:2)
Re:other open source clients? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:other open source clients? (Score:5, Insightful)
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:other open source clients? (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
This is partially because they'll always play catch-up, and partially because they won't be able to improve the specs themselves -- if they do, they'll become incompatible, and crushed by the product everyone uses.
Example of just this effect: RTF, which Microsoft bought back in 1990. Open source RTF readers are usually several versions behind, and anyone expecting to read RTF documents no matter what version have to use the latest Microsoft products to do so. This is not what the situation was like back when RTF was still open (despite being proprietary), and DEC let anyone see the coming changes.
And that's the best case scenario. The worst case scenario is if they close the specs too. That, of course, will kill them in the end, but in the mean time it's going to cause lots of grief.
Re:other open source clients? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:other open source clients? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
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 irrel
It was only a matter of time.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Malicious software re-packaging is a lame excuse too.
Re:It was only a matter of time.. (Score:5, Insightful)
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".
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re:It was only a matter of time.. (Score:5, Insightful)
No. It doesn't sound like business as usual to me.
Re:It was only a matter of time.. (Score:5, Interesting)
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.. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:It was only a matter of time.. (Score:5, Informative)
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: (Score:3, Insightful)
If the new bittorrent protocol is not compatible with the old one, people will probably stick with whatever works (meaning the old protocol, since most pirate BT trackers probably won't be switching).
If they add an extension, most clients not willing to license the SDK will probably ignore it, especially if it's not beneficial (imagine mainli
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
So.... (Score:4, Insightful)
Ryan Fenton
Re:So.... (Score:5, Funny)
Ryan Fenton? That's a strange name for a protocol...
Re:So.... (Score:4, Funny)
Done and done! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:So.... (Score:5, Funny)
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...
Re:So.... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:So.... (Score:5, Insightful)
-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.
Re:So.... (Score:4, Interesting)
I can easily picture the various motion picture and software copyright lawyers sending a few dark glasses wearing "lawyers" to explain "nice little business you got here, I'd hate to see anything happen to it" to encourage Bittorrent both to avoid providing encrypted transfers and to add "load monitoring" features that ease tracking. I'm not saying this is sure to happen, but with the source closed, it wouldn't take much to add hooks to report specific downloads to the mothership.
RTFA and I'm confused (Score:2)
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 thi
Whoops... (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re:RTFA and I'm confused (Score:4, Insightful)
If only... (Score:5, Funny)
Oh, wait...
Re:If only... (Score:5, Insightful)
So.... (Score:5, Funny)
The argument doesn't scan.. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:The argument doesn't scan.. (Score:5, Informative)
Because that's not enough to constitute infringement of the license. People are welcome to repackage and resell GPL software. But they also need to consider trademark issues. They can call the software almost anything they like, they can claim that their product is just like another, but if they claim that their product is the other one, then the original company can take them to court and sue their euphemisms off.
And that, of course, is why claiming that GPLed software is open to this kind of abuse is the reddest of red herrings. Trading on someone else's good name is well covered in the laws of most countries, and the GPL has exactly zero impact on such abusive practices.
Who cares? (Score:5, Interesting)
Note that they opposed the addition of encryption, and they were completely ignored. BitTorrent, the company, is entirely irrelevant.
Bittornado (Score:3, Interesting)
There, that should tide us over for a while.
Not a good move (Score:5, Funny)
GPL (Score:2)
Re:GPL (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Time for someone to code a better alternative. (Score:2)
editors? more like lamers. (Score:2, Informative)
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."
editors? don't forget taggers. (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
The Explaination Makes No Sense. (Score:3, Informative)
"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 [slashdot.org]
.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.
Re: (Score:2)
This will become (Score:2, Insightful)
The difference (Score:3, Informative)
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?
O/T (Score:5, Funny)
I can only hope... (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
This is so useless i want to cry. (Score:3, Interesting)
Worst. Protocol. Ever.
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
Not Entirely Accurate and Not Entirely Catastophic (Score:3, Interesting)
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 [ktorrent.org], there seems to be a near dead-heat for most popular client between uTorrent and Azureus [sourceforge.net] (also open source), with certain alternative clients like Transmission [m0k.org], Bitrocket [bitrocket.org], and KTorrent [ktorrent.org] 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.
What's the negative of closed source in this case? (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:What's the negative of closed source in this ca (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:What's the negative of closed source in this ca (Score:5, Insightful)
Heh heh. (Score:5, Insightful)
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
Must ... resist ... pun ... can't ... (Score:5, Funny)
Sorry about that. Truly, deeply sorry.
Looking forward to spending more time with family (Score:5, Funny)
A: Once word gets out about our RIAA backdoor, Azureus is going to kick our ass. Ummm... you better not print that.
What am i missing (Score:5, Insightful)
Minority presence (Score:3)
Re:I don't see the big deal with this (Score:4, Insightful)