Very old version in repositories

[saads]

Binary package hint: bittorrent

The official Bittorrent client is now at version 5.3 but the version in the repositories is 3.4.2. The licensing issues should no longer be an issue because it is now released under GPLv3. Please update this package since the default gnome bittorrent downloader is problematic for many reasons - it is slow, each torrent has its own window, torrents do not persist, there are very few configuration options, etc.

[Michael Janssen (jamuraa)]

severity 302613 wishlist
merge 302613 298814
thanks

--
Michael Janssen --- Jamuraa --- <email address hidden> --- <email address hidden>

[Sacrificial-spam-address (sacrificial-spam-address)]

merge 302613 309904

[Michael Janssen (jamuraa)]

These bugs deserve a note on them why they aren't fixed yet.

It is not possible for me to package the new BitTorrent (anything 4.0
or beyond) because of restrictions of the new license. There are
basically two problems with it:
   1) The license has a "choice of venue" clause which requires that
      everyone submit to the laws of California, which fails the DFSG.
      This doesn't bother me too much, I would just package it into
      non-free.
   2) The license requires that versions be available for 6 months
      after they are offered. This is something we don't require
      our mirror network to adhere to and we can't really ensure in
      general even though snapshot.debian.net exists.

Currently the authors have agreed by email to remove the problem
clause with choice of venue but have not agreed to remove the "keep
old versions around" clause.

For more info on the discussion of the new license:
http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2005/04/msg00008.html
http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2005/03/msg00181.html
http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2005/04/msg00053.html

--
Michael Janssen --- Jamuraa --- <email address hidden> --- <email address hidden>

[Guido Trotter (ultrotter)]

Hi!

Are there any news about bittorrent's licence? Will it be possible to have the
new version included in Debian? Otherwise it might just be sensible, even if
sad, to remove it, rather than continue to ship the old one forever...

What do you think?

Thanks!

Guido

[Michael Janssen (jamuraa)]

On Mon, 26 Sep 2005, Guido Trotter wrote:

>
> Hi!
>
> Are there any news about bittorrent's licence? Will it be possible to have the
> new version included in Debian? Otherwise it might just be sensible, even if
> sad, to remove it, rather than continue to ship the old one forever...
>
> What do you think?
>
> Thanks!
>
> Guido

I have seen some movement on licensing, but I haven't gotten anything
in around a month on it. I am thinking of pinging the author again to
see what is up. I do know that he contacted all the authors and
contributors recently to renounce their copyright on the source in
some movement to control the BitTorrent copyright centrally.

I don't think it is grounds for removal, because the old version works
okay with the exception of a couple bugs. If the license never
changes however I will probably focus on fixing some of those bugs
myself instead of having upstream fix it.

--
Michael Janssen --- Jamuraa --- <email address hidden> --- <email address hidden>

[Michael Janssen (jamuraa)]

merge 329707 298814
severity 329706 minor
thanks

--
Michael Janssen --- Jamuraa --- <email address hidden> --- <email address hidden>

[Eric Dorland (eric-debian)]

I've just seen someone running the version 4.4 client and I'm lusting
after it. Any more movement on the license front?

--
Eric Dorland <email address hidden>
ICQ: #61138586, Jabber: <email address hidden>
1024D/16D970C6 097C 4861 9934 27A0 8E1C 2B0A 61E9 8ECF 16D9 70C6

-----BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK-----
Version: 3.12
GCS d- s++: a-- C+++ UL+++ P++ L++ E++ W++ N+ o K- w+
O? M++ V-- PS+ PE Y+ PGP++ t++ 5++ X+ R tv++ b+++ DI+ D+
G e h! r- y+
------END GEEK CODE BLOCK------

[Eric Dorland (eric-debian)]

My roommate and I have just had a look at the license for the 4.4.0
release and those problematic clauses have been removed!!! Do a diff
on the 4.0.0 license and the 4.4.0 license from the source tarballs
and you'll see. Get packaging :)

--
Eric Dorland <email address hidden>
ICQ: #61138586, Jabber: <email address hidden>
1024D/16D970C6 097C 4861 9934 27A0 8E1C 2B0A 61E9 8ECF 16D9 70C6

-----BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK-----
Version: 3.12
GCS d- s++: a-- C+++ UL+++ P++ L++ E++ W++ N+ o K- w+
O? M++ V-- PS+ PE Y+ PGP++ t++ 5++ X+ R tv++ b+++ DI+ D+
G e h! r- y+
------END GEEK CODE BLOCK------

[Michael Janssen (jamuraa)]

On Thu, 16 Feb 2006, Eric Dorland wrote:

> I've just seen someone running the version 4.4 client and I'm lusting
> after it. Any more movement on the license front?
>
> --
> Eric Dorland <email address hidden>
> ICQ: #61138586, Jabber: <email address hidden>
> 1024D/16D970C6 097C 4861 9934 27A0 8E1C 2B0A 61E9 8ECF 16D9 70C6

We've had some small movement in the form of the BitTorrent Open
Source Licence 1.1, but it still isn't enough movement to consider it
free according to the debian-legal people.

The current summary is:
http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2005/10/msg00066.html

I can ping the authors again, but I don't think they'll be that
responsive. It's a pretty big hurdle to them, because they want to be
able to preserve their trademarks, etc.

At this point I'm seriously considering just taking the package to
non-free. It has gone through so many improvements the version in
Debian now is almost a shame.

--
Michael Janssen --- Jamuraa --- <email address hidden> --- <email address hidden>

[Michael Janssen (jamuraa)]

On Thu, 16 Feb 2006, Eric Dorland wrote:

> My roommate and I have just had a look at the license for the 4.4.0
> release and those problematic clauses have been removed!!! Do a diff
> on the 4.0.0 license and the 4.4.0 license from the source tarballs
> and you'll see. Get packaging :)

The 4.4.0 license is the same as earlier 4.x versions of BitTorrent,
they still use the BOSL 1.1 license, which was covered in the last
email which I sent to you - unless they changed the license without
changing the version number, it still fails at least the tentacles of
evil test.

--
Michael Janssen --- Jamuraa --- <email address hidden> --- <email address hidden>

[Eric Dorland (eric-debian)]

* Michael Janssen (<email address hidden>) wrote:
> On Thu, 16 Feb 2006, Eric Dorland wrote:
>
> > My roommate and I have just had a look at the license for the 4.4.0
> > release and those problematic clauses have been removed!!! Do a diff
> > on the 4.0.0 license and the 4.4.0 license from the source tarballs
> > and you'll see. Get packaging :)
>
>
> The 4.4.0 license is the same as earlier 4.x versions of BitTorrent,
> they still use the BOSL 1.1 license, which was covered in the last
> email which I sent to you - unless they changed the license without
> changing the version number, it still fails at least the tentacles of
> evil test.

Sorry I saw from my cursory examination that those sections had been
changed and they looked OK to me. I didn't realize there were other
problems. It really is a shame there license is so problematic. Please
continue to encourage them to fix the problem parts of their license,
it would be great to have this piece of software in Debian.

--
Eric Dorland <email address hidden>
ICQ: #61138586, Jabber: <email address hidden>
1024D/16D970C6 097C 4861 9934 27A0 8E1C 2B0A 61E9 8ECF 16D9 70C6

-----BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK-----
Version: 3.12
GCS d- s++: a-- C+++ UL+++ P++ L++ E++ W++ N+ o K- w+
O? M++ V-- PS+ PE Y+ PGP++ t++ 5++ X+ R tv++ b+++ DI+ D+
G e h! r- y+
------END GEEK CODE BLOCK------

[Reinhard Tartler (siretart)]

Steven has asked about pacakge conflicts on ubuntu-devel, and the topic
about the new licence came up. I'm forwarding relevant parts of that
email to the relevant debian bugreport.

Gruesse,
 Reinhard

----- Forwarded message from Steven Hazel <email address hidden> -----

Envelope-to: <email address hidden>
Delivery-date: Wed, 26 Jul 2006 01:18:13 +0200
From: Steven Hazel <email address hidden>
To: Reinhard Tartler <email address hidden>
Subject: Re: BitTorrent package conflicts
Cc: <email address hidden>

On 7/25/06, Reinhard Tartler <email address hidden> wrote:
>
>Steven Hazel wrote:
>> Okay. At first blush, it looks like these license problems are
>> fairly superficial -- I'll bring it up around here and see whether we
>can
>> get them resolved.
>
>That would be really great. If that happens, we can fix the package
>directly in place when some transition or other changes to dependencies
>happen.

We've got someone writing this up for our lawyers now, so hopefully this
will work out.

[...]

---- End forwarded message -----

[Michael Janssen (jamuraa)]

On Wed, 26 Jul 2006, Reinhard Tartler wrote:

> Steven has asked about pacakge conflicts on ubuntu-devel, and the topic
> about the new licence came up. I'm forwarding relevant parts of that
> email to the relevant debian bugreport.
>
> Gruesse,
> Reinhard

Thanks - I've located this thread on the ubuntu lists, so I'm
following it on gmane now. I hope that this gets resolved, this is
perhaps the third or fourth time that they have headed off to their
lawyers without any response back (changing the license or any email).
I really hope it works so we can get BitTorrent 4.x into Debian and
Ubuntu.

--
Michael Janssen --- Jamuraa --- <email address hidden> --- <email address hidden>

[saads (shakhshir)]

Binary package hint: bittorrent

The official Bittorrent client is now at version 4.20.9 but the version in the repositories is 3.4.2. There are even debs available at http://www.bittorrent.com/download.html Please update this package since the default gnome bittorrent downloader is problematic for many reasons - it is slow, each torrent has its own window, torrents do not persist, there are very few configuration options, etc.

[Mateusz Drożdżyński (matid)]

There are some licensing issues with bittorrent 4.x, it has already been covered in Debian (see http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=298814).
I'm not sure if it couldn't be included in Universe or Multiverse though, I'll try to investigate this matter more thoroughly.

[Andrew Ash (ash211)]

Our choices seem to be similar to Debian's: 1) put in non-free, 2) wait for licensing issues to subside, 3) fix errors ourselves, which Debian may resort to.

I'm not sure how strict Ubuntu's licensing issues are, this may actually be a possibility to get the latest version into main.

[Sam Morris (yrro)]

# Automatically generated email from bts, devscripts version 2.9.26
merge 365331 298814

[Andrew Ash (ash211)]

Has there been any update to the licensing issues with Bittorrent?

This bug has also been reported to Ubuntu's bugtracker at
https://launchpad.net/bugs/58917

[Andrew Ash (ash211)]

Just sent an email requesting update to the linked bug. Hopefully we'll get a positive response.

[Michael Janssen (jamuraa)]

At this stage I'm about ready to move it to non-free, as it is almost
laughable how old the bittorrent client in debian is right now. I
have pinged the developers multiple times since their latest license
revision and got no response at all, unfortunately. I attempt to fix
bugs myself but some of them are just a bit hard to crack.

I'll probably give it a month or two (busy time for me atm) and then
initiate a new package bittorrent-5 (or bittorrent-nonfree) in
non-free that is derived from the newest branch. The BitTorrent Open
Source License v1.1 [1] is at least free enough to go into non-free
according to my last thread on debian-devel [2].

1. http://www.bittorrent.com/license
2. http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2005/10/msg00042.html

--
Michael Janssen --- Jamuraa --- <email address hidden> --- <email address hidden>

On 2/12/07, Andrew Ash <email address hidden> wrote:
> Has there been any update to the licensing issues with Bittorrent?
>
> This bug has also been reported to Ubuntu's bugtracker at
> https://launchpad.net/bugs/58917
>
>

[Imre Gergely (cemc)]

Hello

Is there any word on this? I'm just upgrading my server to ubuntu (well, i'm testing it before i upgrade), and found that the bittorrent version in the repository is kinda old. Will there be some update to this ever? I like the maketorrent-console and bttrack tracker.

[Imre Gergely (cemc)]

It seems to me the bittornado package is a good alternative to this, at least until problems get resolved.

[newacct (newacct)]

Since BitTorrent version 5.3 is released under the GPL (http://www.bittorrent.com/btusers/download/directory-list#section-mac), is there any chance that this package can be updated to that version?

[New Acct (zeruelx)]

Since BitTorrent version 5.3 is released under the GPL (http://www.bittorrent.com/btusers/download/directory-list#section-mac), is there any chance that this package can now be updated to that version?
Thanks,

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