Torvalds knifes Tridgell

[spinynorman]

Is this important or a storm in a teacup? :unsure:

[Qchem]

This is a tricky situation.

 

The 'free' version of bitkeeper was yanked as Tridgell was attempting to reverse engineer it, you can see why the owner of bitkeeper would react that way - he makes a living from selling the program.

 

The problem is Tridgell (the guy behind samba) basically reverse engineered MS's version of SMB to come up with samba. To condem his actions on bitkeeper is to also condem them with samba.

 

Of course you could argue that the situations are different, bitkeeper is much less useful to most linux users and you're harming the income of one guy not an evil faceless corporation.....

[Guest Adriano1]

Do go and read all the thread. Linus makes a lot more sense than what the Register credits him with.

 

Basically, he does say that Openoffice and Samba are one thing (two things, yes), and that they do solve a problem. OTOH, what Tridge did in this case solved nothing and caused massive "discomfort" to all (to summarize a bit).

 

Interesting thread, and interesting development also: who knows where this is going to get, with git in development?

Edited April 15, 2005 by Adriano

[Dyslexic]

Yet another one-sided report from the Register. Microsoft does not make networking tools for Linux, so Samba was addressing a void in the market. Nothing is taken away from Microsoft by Samba since the purpose of Samba isn't to replace Netbios, but to work with it. You could argue that people are using *nix file servers instead of Windows file servers thanks to Samba, but that's entirely speculative. The flipside could also be true. People are able to join Windows servers onto *nix file servers because of Samba. (Although it's a much better idea to run NFS on Windows, IT departments have a knack for doing things the wrong way.)

 

In the case of Bitkeeper, the company gave licenses to kernel developers. The only possible use for reverse engineering these protocols is to steal metadata. Metadata is an asset to this company.

 

It's like if Apple gave your friends free iTunes access, and you also got free access because they vouched for you, and you used this access to find a way for other users to steal MP3s. Of course Apple will take away everyone's free access, leaving your friends screwed over.

[Guest Adriano1]

I wouldn't compare what Tridge did with stealing. Reverse engineering is not a crime, and even less so in this case. What Linus objects to is that Tridge did all of this for no "good" purpose. Meaning that if at least something positive had come out of this (a new SCM, say), things wouldn't be this bad. This way, Tridge didn't get to do what he wanted, and everyone else lost.

 

Of course, this has kicked Linus ass into building his own software and it seems to be heavily developed. So something good _is_ coming out of this mess.

[spinynorman]

Bruce Perens has now joined the fray.

[Cannonfodder]

My initial reaction was that linus just woke up on the wrong side of bed. Cool it indeed..

[Guest Adriano1]

As I continued reading what Linus meant, I got the impression he was a bit righter than what everyone is thinking.

 

I mean, everyone is berating him and saying "We told you proprietary software doesn't work". Well, I see it as "Look, I throw a spanner in the cogs, and it doesn't work anymore" Duh. BK was the _best_ software available for the job and it certainly changed the pace of development. A lot of good things have come to be because of it. So I don't get that "Linus is being an idiot" thing. I mean, if someone broke your computer for no good purpose wouldn't you be upset?

[adamw]

adriano: the problem is Linus' attitude to Tridgell. McVoy has the _right_ to withdraw the free client at any time - it was a dumb decision, but he does have that right. However, there was nothing wrong with what tridge was doing, and there was a perfectly valid justification for it; Linus may be a pragmatist but there are a lot of people out there, some of them kernel hackers, who are free software idealists and did not feel comfortable using a proprietary program to maintain the kernel, even though it didn't cost anything. The samba team did not reverse engineer SMB to provide a Unix client for it, necessarily, but to provide a *free software* client, and that's what tridge was doing for BK. The real problem here is that Linus has been stuffed by his own decision to use proprietary tools on the basis of immediate exigency, which is what RMS has been warning people against all along, and he's now having a bit of a hissy fit and blaming tridge, when it's really his own fault for relying on something intrinsically unreliable (mcvoy's goodwill in providing a free bk client).

[Cannonfodder]

Well said On Linus's defense, we all get like that from time to time so perhaps he will re-evaluate his stance on this. If it results in an open source bm software then they will always be able to make modifications in the spirit of open source rather than a private package. Again, in his defense, he has a big task to do and McVoy's product was mking life easier for him. Now his schedule is probably screwed up. But maybe he's blaming the wrong party?

[Guest Adriano1]

Well, yes, but I hardly expect Linus to be happy about this situation. And as I said, I see this as very close to the example I mentioned earlier. As I read it Tridge wasn't implementing a full replacement to BK at all. Anyway, that would have voided the BK licence in a clearer manner, so it doesn't matter.

 

And no, I don't see what proprietary has to do here... If you don't comply with a license you accepted, you have to expect "teh bads". No matter if it's the GPL, or a proprietary licence, and whether it's because you reverse engineer or because you whistle "yankee doodle" while using the software.

 

Of course, an open source tool doesn't leave you high and dry because you can fork it, but then again, in this case I saw it more as "hey, I deliberately broke this and I knew it" from Tridge. I guess we have to wait for a statement from him.

Edited April 16, 2005 by Adriano

[Guest Adriano1]

there was nothing wrong with what tridge was doing, and there was a perfectly valid justification for it

 

Well... There was the small bit about it getting linux development into this problem we have now, doesn't it?

I know there's nothing wrong with reverse engineering in general. But in the particular case it was pretty bad. If it ain't broke...

[adamw]

No, what tridge did isn't what got Linux development into the state it is now. That would be what McVoy did. Thought experiment:

 

Someone says to you 'if you go and buy some milk, I'll kill this kitten'. You go buy some milk. The nutjob kills the kitten. Is that your responsibility? No. There's nothing wrong with going to buy some milk; it's not a morally or legally problematic action. The responsibility is on the nutjob. It was he who invented the condition and he who killed the kitten.

 

That's exactly what we have here. Most people would agree there's nothing wrong with sniffing an app's network traffic in order to create an open-source equivalent - as has been remarked, that's exactly what Samba is. It's McVoy who, utterly arbitrarily, said 'if you keep sniffing my network traffic, I'll yank the free product'. It wasn't God or the law or tridge himself who set that condition, it was McVoy.

 

As for licensing issues, they're moot. tridge never agreed to a BK license, hence he can't be violating it. Someone else in the same company as him once did, but that's neither here nor there.

[iphitus]

Except most people wouldnt buy the milk to kill the kitten.

 

And if the kitten were microsoft, after buying the milk, the nutter wouldnt be able to kill the kitten.

 

Theres also a difference between reverse engineering something which 1 person makes a living off, and reverse engineering samba which microsoft dont rely on for a living. Its only one minor thing, they can survive without it.

 

Microsoft arent going to fall into ruins because their product has been reverse engineered.

 

Bitkeeper could, its a one man party.

 

iphitus

[Guest Adriano1]

Adamw, sorry but the milk-n'-kitten analogy doesn't cut it. In this case there were rules Larry McVoy set for free use of BK. If everyone agrees with them (I will not argue if they were stupid or not) and then someone breaks them, you have to expect something like this to happen. It's not a case of "if you do this I do that". It's a case of

 

"Do you agree to a situation where if you do this I'll do that?"

"Yes, because of x reason "

"Sorry, you broke the rules. BLAM"

"Aaw man...(internal bickering to the poor sap who challenged the rules)"

 

Even if they were stupid rules, people got on with it because of a distinct advantage. BK is, after all, the best tool for the job yet.