[drewdevault]

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.

[luckydude]

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?

[drewdevault]

>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:

https://paste.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/0b3f1f1d77896a96b0777471785cdc...

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.

So, do I just send you my bank account number or?