This is completely untrue. There is no way that you could make a BK clone by telneting to a BK and running commands. Those commands don't tell you the network protocol, they show you the results of that protocol but show zero insight into the protocol.
Tridge neglected to tell people that he was snooping the network while Linus was running BK commands when Linus was visiting in his house. THAT is how he did the clone.
The fact that you all believe Tridge is disappointing, you should be better than that.
The fact that Tridge lied is disappointing but I've learned that open source people are willing to ignore morals if it gets them what they want. I love open source, don't love the ethics. It's not just Tridge.
> There is no way that you could make a BK clone by telneting to a BK and running commands. Those commands don't tell you the network protocol
The network protocol, according to multiple sources and the presented talk at LCA, was "send text to the port that's visible in the URL, get text back". The data received was SCCS, which was an understood format with existing tools. And the tool Tridge wrote, sourcepuller, didn't clone all of BitKeeper, it cloned enough to fetch sources, which meant "connect, send command, get back SCCS".
Anything more than that is hearsay that's entirely inconsistent with the demonstrated evidence. Do you have any references supporting either that the protocol was more complicated than he demonstrated on stage at LCA, or that Tridge committed the network surveillance you're claiming?
And to be clear, beyond that, there's absolutely nothing immoral with more extensively reverse-engineering a proprietary tool to write a compatible Open Source equivalent. (If, as you claim, he also logged a friend's network traffic without their express knowledge and consent, that is problematic, but again, the necessity of doing that seems completely inconsistent with the evidence from many sources. If that did happen, I would be mildly disappointed in that alone, but would still appreciate the net resulting contribution to the world.)
I appreciate that you were incensed by Tridge's work at the time, and may well still be now, but that doesn't make it wrong. Those of us who don't use proprietary software appreciate the net increase in available capabilities, just like we appreciate the ability to interoperate with SMB using Samba no matter how inconvenient that was for Microsoft.
Fascinating, I was unaware of that link (and don't systematically check people's HN profiles before replying). Thank you for the reference; I've edited my comment to take that into account.
> The data received was SCCS, which was an understood format with existing tools.
You'd be surprised. SCCS is not broadly understood. And BK is not exactly SCCS.
I read the SourcePuller code when it was published (sp-01). It's pretty easy reading. I give Tridge credit for that. I wrote a little test, got it to checkout the wrong data with no errors reported. Issue was still there in sp-02 .
Rick saying "I worked on BK" is the understatement of the century. He showed up and looked at my code, I had done things in a way that you could have walked the weave and extract any number of versions at the same time. He was really impressed with that. I split apart stuff that Rick had not seen before.
Then he proceeded to fix my code over and over again. I had a basic understanding of SCCS but Rick understood the details.
Rick knows more about SCM than any guy I know.
And he is right, SCCS is not well understood and BK even less so.
Come on, man, you should be better than this. With so many years of hindsight surely you realize by now that reverse engineering is not some moral failing? How much intellectual and cultural wealth is attributable to it? And with Google v. Oracle we've finally settled even in the eyes of the law that the externally visible APIs and behavior of an implementation are not considered intellectual property.
Tridge reverse engineering bk and kicking off a series of events that led to git is probably one of the most positively impactful things anyone has done for the software industry, ever. He does not deserve the flack he got for it, either then or today. I'm grateful to him, as we all should be. I know that it stings for you, but I hope that with all of this hindsight you're someday able to integrate the experience and move on with a positive view of this history -- because even though it didn't play out the way you would have liked, your own impact on this story is ultimately very positive and meaningful and you should take pride in it without demeaning others.
I don't like cheaters. If Tridge had done what he said he did, go him, I'm all for people being smart and figuring stuff out. But that is not what he did and it disgusts me that he pretends it is.
There is absolutely zero chance he figured out the pull protocol via telnet. I will happily pay $10,000 to anyone could do that with zero access to BK. Can't be done. If I'm wrong, I'll pay up. But I'll have a lot of questions that can't be answered.
So he cheated, he got Linus to run BK commands at his house and he snooped the network. He had no legal access to those bytes. Without those snoops, no chance he reverse engineered it.
As I have seen over and over, when the open source people want something, they will twist themselves in knots to justify getting it, legality be damned.
How about you be better than this and admit that open source is not without its skeletons?
>So he cheated, he got Linus to run BK commands at his house and he snooped the network. He had no legal access to those bytes. Without those snoops, no chance he reverse engineered it.
Snooping the network is a common and entirely legal means of reverse engineering.
>There is absolutely zero chance he figured out the pull protocol via telnet. I will happily pay $10,000 to anyone could do that with zero access to BK. Can't be done. If I'm wrong, I'll pay up. But I'll have a lot of questions that can't be answered.
I just tried this myself. Here's the telnet session:
I confess that I had to look up the name of the BK_REMOTE_PROTOCOL environment variable after a few false starts to put the pieces together, but it would be relatively easy to guess.
I also looked over Tridge's original sourcepuller code and didn't really see anything that you couldn't infer from this telnet session about how bk works.
Tridge neglected to tell people that he was snooping the network while Linus was running BK commands when Linus was visiting in his house. THAT is how he did the clone.
The fact that you all believe Tridge is disappointing, you should be better than that.
The fact that Tridge lied is disappointing but I've learned that open source people are willing to ignore morals if it gets them what they want. I love open source, don't love the ethics. It's not just Tridge.