Tridge wins the 2005 Free Software Award [LWN.net]

Tridge wins the 2005 Free Software Award

Posted Jan 26, 2006 2:11 UTC (Thu) by lm (guest, #6402)
In reply to: Tridge wins the 2005 Free Software Award by kirkengaard
Parent article: Tridge wins the 2005 Free Software Award

> Consider that Tridge violated no license agreement

Let's set the record straight on this one. He definitely violated the
license. He was using bkbits.net as a test case and we changed what was
required to be sent to bkbits to talk to it. Low and behold a few days
later Tridge's stuff sent the new things required in the protocol.

Now it is possible that he just randomly guessed the right thing but if he
was doing that we would have seen tons and tons of tests against bkbits
until he got it right. We didn't.

So he ran bk to see what it sent. He did or someone helping him did, either way it's a license violation. Read the license.

Tridge has done a great job marketing that it was just "telnet" to do this.
Perhaps he'd like to explain the above and perhaps he'd like to explain how
a simple telnet turned into 14,000 lines of code. Seems like telnet ought
to be

f = popen("telnet linux.bkbits.net", r");

What's the other 13,999 lines for, eh?

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Tridge wins the 2005 Free Software Award

Posted Jan 26, 2006 2:27 UTC (Thu) by beoba (guest, #16942) [Link]

Here you go:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/04/21/tridgell_bitkeepe...

Enjoy.

Tridge wins the 2005 Free Software Award

Posted Jan 26, 2006 5:18 UTC (Thu) by kirkengaard (subscriber, #15022) [Link]

You're making bad assumptions.

1) That the only way you can access BitKeeper is by running a copy yourself
2) That without running your own BitKeeper, it's just random guessing
3) That someone else running Bitkeeper "helped" him intentionally
4) That Andrew Tridgell is a liar.

Anyone running a server that communicates meaningfully over basic network protocols is vulnerable to attacks that listen and figure out the language of its communications. It's like cryptanalysis only with transmissions in cleartext of a different language.

Just because you find it hard to belive, and can't do it yourself, doesn't make it impossible.

You have also brought an onerous accusation. If you have evidence of a license violation on Mr. Tridgell's part, please, come forward with it. I'm sure we'd like to see you back up your libel. Please, "set the record straight" for us. For starters, tell us when he accepted the license agreement. You can work from there. You sound like you think you're smart enough for that. Show us contract, and we'll talk contract violation.

Tridge wins the 2005 Free Software Award

Posted Jan 26, 2006 9:26 UTC (Thu) by gowen (guest, #23914) [Link]

Even assuming every word you say is true, and tridge ran BK contrary to the license (and I know who I believe to be the more likely to dissemble) ...

Given that the legality of reverse engineering for the purpose of interoperability has been repeatedly affirmed the the Australian Supreme Court, do you really believe that your license that attempted to relieve users of that right to be legally binding?

Tridge wins the 2005 Free Software Award

Posted Jan 28, 2006 5:29 UTC (Sat) by aliguori (subscriber, #30636) [Link]

Hi Larry,

We don't know each, so I'm not sure how much this will mean to you. I had the pleasure of working with tridge for a few years now. While working on Samba, I can personally attest that tridge is very conservative when it comes to reverse engineering. He knows the law very well and has made conservative choices on a number of occasions when other projects haven't.

If you want to discuss the changes to the protocol you made and how tridge could have figured them out without a large number of requests to bitkeeper, feel free to contact me or continue the conversation here--trust me, there's a lot of really clever ways to approach this sort of thing.

Tridge is one of the few people I've met that I have complete faith in. That's not to say I always agree with his decisions, but if he said he didn't do something, I have complete faith in the fact that he didn't.

I won't argue with you about whether reverse engineering BitKeeper's protocol was a "moral" thing to do. It doesn't matter, it's a religious issue. If you want to hate tridge for doing that, fine. Please don't accuse him of lying though. I know you probably feel there's a lot of ill-will directed toward you (and there probably is), but that doesn't mean you have to degenerate to that level.