Is Tixati not open source?

If not, why not!?

Tixati is probably closed source in order to protect itself and its users from spying and unwanted activity, including fake versions, backdoors and imitations.

I'm sorry to say, but your answer is FUD (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear,_uncertainty_and_doubt).  GPG is open source and Free Software, it is a standard for personal security and privacy protection, I could mention Linux as another widely known piece of sensible software that is both Open Source and Free Software.

It seems that this software is closed source because the author decided that the open source model is not interest of him.

Kudos to the Author for releasing it to the public (I personally love it) as a Free as in Beer Software.

oh, again...

if you want source, look for Software license in en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_BitTorrent_clients#General
or take "aria2c" source

but here is hint: tixati is best and others are crap.

i respect authors' right to keep it closed source.

Open source is a sword with two blade. It can be harmful (finding exploits in code) or it can be useful (creating more secure software like every cryptography software out there.)

Anyway, Tixati is in good hands.
I think developer is a great person. The amount of features in software makes it unique. It's like he/she knows network, programming, P2P, Security, ... from inside out.
A truly anonymous expert.

GOD BLESS HIM/HER

Why Open Source misses the point of Free Software

by Richard Stallman

When we call software “free,” we mean that it respects the users' essential freedoms: the freedom to run it, to study and change it, and to redistribute copies with or without changes. This is a matter of freedom, not price, so think of “free speech,” not “free beer.”

These freedoms are vitally important. They are essential, not just for the individual users' sake, but for society as a whole because they promote social solidarity—that is, sharing and cooperation. They become even more important as our culture and life activities are increasingly digitized. In a world of digital sounds, images, and words, free software becomes increasingly essential for freedom in general.

Tens of millions of people around the world now use free software; the public schools of some regions of India and Spain now teach all students to use the free GNU/Linux operating system. Most of these users, however, have never heard of the ethical reasons for which we developed this system and built the free software community, because nowadays this system and community are more often spoken of as “open source”, attributing them to a different philosophy in which these freedoms are hardly mentioned.

The free software movement has campaigned for computer users' freedom since 1983. In 1984 we launched the development of the free operating system GNU, so that we could avoid the nonfree operating systems that deny freedom to their users. During the 1980s, we developed most of the essential components of the system and designed the GNU General Public License (GNU GPL) to release them under—a license designed specifically to protect freedom for all users of a program.

Not all of the users and developers of free software agreed with the goals of the free software movement. In 1998, a part of the free software community splintered off and began campaigning in the name of “open source.” The term was originally proposed to avoid a possible misunderstanding of the term “free software,” but it soon became associated with philosophical views quite different from those of the free software movement.

Some of the supporters of open source considered the term a “marketing campaign for free software,” which would appeal to business executives by highlighting the software's practical benefits, while not raising issues of right and wrong that they might not like to hear. Other supporters flatly rejected the free software movement's ethical and social values. Whichever their views, when campaigning for open source, they neither cited nor advocated those values. The term “open source” quickly became associated with ideas and arguments based only on practical values, such as making or having powerful, reliable software. Most of the supporters of open source have come to it since then, and they make the same association.

The two terms describe almost the same category of software, but they stand for views based on fundamentally different values. Open source is a development methodology; free software is a social movement. For the free software movement, free software is an ethical imperative, essential respect for the users' freedom. By contrast, the philosophy of open source considers issues in terms of how to make software “better”—in a practical sense only. It says that nonfree software is an inferior solution to the practical problem at hand. Most discussion of “open source” pays no attention to right and wrong, only to popularity and success; here's a typical example.

For the free software movement, however, nonfree software is a social problem, and the solution is to stop using it and move to free software.

“Free software.” “Open source.” If it's the same software (or nearly so), does it matter which name you use? Yes, because different words convey different ideas. While a free program by any other name would give you the same freedom today, establishing freedom in a lasting way depends above all on teaching people to value freedom. If you want to help do this, it is essential to speak of “free software.”

We in the free software movement don't think of the open source camp as an enemy; the enemy is proprietary (nonfree) software. But we want people to know we stand for freedom, so we do not accept being mislabeled as open source supporters.

Practical Differences between Free Software and Open Source

In practice, open source stands for criteria a little weaker than those of free software. As far as we know, all existing free software would qualify as open source. Nearly all open source software is free software, but there are exceptions. First, some open source licenses are too restrictive, so they do not qualify as free licenses. For example, “Open Watcom” is nonfree because its license does not allow making a modified version and using it privately. Fortunately, few programs use such licenses.

Second, and more important in practice, many products containing computers check signatures on their executable programs to block users from installing different executables; only one privileged company can make executables that can run in the device or can access its full capabilities. We call these devices “tyrants”, and the practice is called “tivoization” after the product (Tivo) where we first saw it. Even if the executable is made from free source code, the users cannot run modified versions of it, so the executable is nonfree.

The criteria for open source do not recognize this issue; they are concerned solely with the licensing of the source code. Thus, these unmodifiable executables, when made from source code such as Linux that is open source and free, are open source but not free. Many Android products contain nonfree tivoized executables of Linux.

more at: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.html

That is a lovely piece of Stallman copy pasta, but unfortunately it seems to entirely miss the point.

Tixati as it stands is neither Free (as in free speech defined above), or Open Source. I'm glad many on the forum are happy to trust the author, it's a good sign. But it also seems a reasonable question to ask why it remains "Free" only as Free Beer. People are perhaps understandably a little suspicious when it comes to torrenting, and compiling from source would remove that suspicion (justified or not).

So far I've never seen an answer to the open source Tixati question from the author, or an explanation that seems reasonable beyond "I don't care, thank you to the author".

You want to inspect a torrent client, check out libtorrent.
The fact that Tixati is able to implement itself as a stable unique evolving client... without any confusion or infiltration of the proprietary chat and network subsystem would be moot when others can just copy- and possibly sabotage that culture.

If you don't trust the author go elsewhere. uTorrent was a great client. For torrents. Then Bittorrent, Inc. bought it. Now Bittorrent has no less than 6 versions of their client which all do the same thing with different GUI wrapper (See latest spinoff Resilio). While I don't advocate using old versions of software on principle, I can understand where users would have a difficult time with Tixati if for instance it DID somehow get a 'build from source' option... I personally would still use the last version from the original author/dev team.
It's obvious they care about the client and don't just "include everything but the kitchen sink"...
Reasons are like opinions... which are like anuses (all humans have them and its likely they smell).

Hi
Open source is not the paradise, more like said before me, an open source means that the software code (source) program is fully supplied, great for finding bugs or security flaws, but finding these flaws safeties are not necessarily provided, and can be sold or used for purposes of monitoring or other.
dev is to choose, it is still their baby.
From france with love.
Mohadib

I would say this: my vote goes for open source. A user of free culture with more than 10 years of experience. I want to move this topic to a more productive. Let's stop discussing and make a small "+1" voting. Whoever want the Tixati to become open, may post their +1 here. Author will see how much people is interested in the topic. It's, of course, author's baby, but at least opening 90% of the client which implements the most important parts of the torrent stack itself I would see as a good idea. In the future, this piece of software will gain more. If the author leave the project closed, it might die someday, and/or he would anyway open the source, but AFTER the moment anyone would care of. For instance, take a look at Vivaldi web browser - it is closed, but it publishes source code on the web, hope you get the idea. Thanks! Let's +1

This program has been my favorite torrenting program so far, nothing else matches its feature-set or even comes close. The only thing it lacks is the quality of being open-source, which is why I can't use it on any of my more trusted machines. Please open-source Tixati so that I can not have these fears, and so that I can tell all my friends that my torrenting program is better than theirs.

Here's why putting the source out there is a good idea (even if it's not GPL/BSD/MIT licensed):

A) It allows code auditing, which is a minor point.

B) It allows (physically) for in-house modification (even if the license says that's a no-no, piss on the license I have the bits!).

For B specifically, the modification I would simply implement, instead of trolling the developer for it, is differing the DHT port from the torrenting port.  To run Tixati securely (strictly torrents, no channels) over Tor or some other TCP-only SOCKS/HTTP proxy, one currently must disable DHT and thus rely only on TCP-capable trackers.  That's a significant drop in access to the pool of peers in a given torrent, as most trackers are UDP and many torrents are tracker-less.  Actually, now that it's been brought to the developer's attention, it would be unacceptable to not provide 1) a checkbox under DHT for "use different port in range:" and 2) provide two number entry boxes which would be the Min and Max port numbers that will be assigned to DHT, and (bonus) 3) provide a drop-down box which lists time delay between DHT port and identity changes, with minimum value no larger than 5 minutes.

I also have to +1 this. Tixati is fantastic software and I'm not sure why it can't be FOSS. Of course, I respect the developer's decision.

Perhaps they are worried that Tixati will be forked and control will be lost. I doubt that though. Development is really good on this software, as is the support, forums here etc

Not to mention open sourcing the core could surely lead somebody to work on a cocoa gui for osx.

"Open source is a sword with two blade. It can be harmful (finding exploits in code) or it can be useful (creating more secure software like every cryptography software out there.)"

Being open and finding exploits at an accelerated rate is the best way to quickly increase the quality of a codebase. Look at Linux, its open-source nature has contributed to it being one of the largest projects around with some of the highest quality code we've made. You can examine it and find the issues yourself, this is how it's bettered. Being aware of the faults and fixing them, not hiding them and ignoring them(even out of ignorance and inability). You think a few hundred windows developers who just need to get a feature done and don't give a darn about deprecated code, stubs, and such can outclass millions of the most proficient developers worldwide? Especially when they are heavily scrutinized by everyone instead of hiding their disgusting malpractices behind closed doors.

Quality will increase, people will still buy your software, except now they're free to use it as they see fit, which is nice given they paid for it and should have that right. Opening the source doesn't mean it's immediately plagiarized or fully understood and usurped. It adds to an ecosystem that is capable of outgrowing the individual in quality and functionality.

More often than not, well-written open-source software survives like an apex predator. Closed source serves for nothing more than to try to cheat the evolutionary system to outlasts its time. It helps it survive longer than natural selection would normally determine its fitness inadequate. In this case, it's people identifying it to be useful and the best of other software they used, so that software survives. If it were open-source, it would only serve to spawn a better piece, until then it would survive. If it doesn't it's because it shouldn't, because it can be improved.

It's destructive to the whole system, including yourself, to hide such intellectual information. You "made" the program, but really you discovered a set of natural laws which work to produce it. When you don't share this knowledge, you reduce the mutually symbiotic relationships available for everyone to improve and benefit. In the end, you lose the ability to improve your own knowledge effectively.

This is why it should matter to you, not because you're being altruistic; because you're seeking the most effective learning experience. We shouldn't revel in our past, we should create and improve, if we're capable and worth living, then we will make more and more products of value. That could never be stolen from you unless you give up personal expansion. It's moot to even talk about because there are already many examples of FOSS software that have shown it's an effective structure.

Selfishness is okay, but the destruction of you and the environment you depend on out of greed is mathematically inefficient. I'd go so far as to say it's immoral because it's fighting natural tendency towards the most effective machine.

Protip: This is true for FOSS because it's true for us as individuals.

my guess as to why tixati isn't open source is it probably utilises a proprietary C++ library written by the tixati developer which is used in his or her own software projects, perhaps as a full time job or consulting for other companies. It's a pity really. The library seems to handle cross platform GUI and networking really well. I had a similar experience actually, I wrote a library for interfacing with a piece of hardware but was paid $ to develop it, and the company didn't want that code being open to the public.

Sadly it restrains me using it on my Linux machine which I won't run proprietary software on. For my windows machine though, you're in the trap already, who cares about adding another layer.

Still it would be really interesting to know why the author doesn't want to OS this. And not the guesses by other ppl.
I've also started doing software non opensource at first, but over time I've grown to see the bright sides of doing so and loosing the angst that sb could / would steal it what o'ever.

I love this software to bits, but the fact that I am writing in a 4 year-old thread (the last message being from 2 years ago) shows how much I wish that Tixati was open source.

Currently I trust the dev/devs simply because he/she/they has/have built an outstanding piece of software and rely on donations as a reward, but while most of the ticked things from the homepage of this website are easily verifiable I can't know for a fact that there is 'NO spyware' included in the software. Furthermore I agree with those who are a little worried about the destiny of Tixati in the very long term.

In the Discover section of this website there is a beautiful picture which describes the fundamental differences between centralized downloading and P2P.
Funnily enough those differences seem to reflect the ones between proprietary software vs open source software:
- in the case of a single developer, the development of proprietary software can be slow;
- if a coding mistake is made, proprietary software is compromised without anyone knowing it;
- proprietary software requires always-fresh perspective and an unbelievable amount of knowledge to be perfect

Now Tixati gets regular updates and it perfectly responds to my basic needs, so I am in no way attacking the quality of the job done. However:
- the development of open source software can be faster as it is directly propelled by a larger community;
- 'no single point of failure' = public/3rd-party auditing and inherent transparency make open source software more trusted and actually bullet-proof;
- 'all downloaders are also uploaders' = users can lend a hand

I don't believe that Tixati will ever become libre software, but I really hope that the owner reads this and seriously thinks about it.

I have been using Tixati for as long as I have used a torrent client. Big big thanks for that Kevin (unless wikipedia 'https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tixati'  is wrong).

The fact that in all those years there has never been any mention of it as spy/malware from any major authority on network security gives me confidence that it isn't/doesn't.

I totally respect the developer(s) choice to keep it non open sourced, even though I would like to learn (and yes also copy) from his work.

@sxiii: Your proposal to vote is hilarious, why let a majority of ignorami decide on 1 persons work. It's his, and his alone, to do with whatever he wants. His work is not in a democracy of programming.

@ whoever is/was "Guest on 2016/12/20 05:37:12 PM":
 

I would have stayed anonymous too if I had written this. "Greed" really? I hope the man (Kevin I guess) has become a multi billionaire on the back of Tixati.

Compared to what MicroCrap, Google, Facebook and Apple are raking in while spying on us and showering us with unwanted ads ( , back to math school for you!. And by the way, selfishness in NOT OK, are you D Trump by any chance? He (the author) provides us with a tool to watch media for free, you're using it shows you're a cheapskate too, and now you're dissing this guy? He's a saint.

Let's stop arguing and just appreciate the software. The developer has earned my trust not to include spyware or malware. It's his software, his property. I mostly use FOSS and open source software but it's not our decision to open source it.  I'm not any of the people above.

I've been using Tixati for a couple of years, but the fact that it's proprietary software still makes me feel uneasy. I mean, if you're already using Windows like me you're already being spied on anyway, so what it really doesn't make a difference. But just for argument's sake, here's a list of other proprietary bit-torrent clients (Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_BitTorrent_clients  ):

- Acquisition: Dead shareware.
- FlashGet: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FlashGet#Malware_concerns
- Free Download Manager: Not much to say about this one. Used to be FOSS at some point.
- Meerkat Bittorrent Client: Dead freeware.
- Opera: No comment.
- Tonido: Freeware. Not much to say about this one either.
- Xunlei: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xunlei#Concerns_and_criticisms
- Vuze: Addware. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vuze#Criticism
- BitComet: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitComet#Controversy_and_criticism
- BitTorrent: Freemium addware.
- μTorrent: Do I really need to say anything?
- BitLord: Based on BitComet code. Adware.
- Folx: No comment.
- ABC (Yet Another BitTorrent Client): Dead.

So it really doesn't inspire confidence when Tixati is in the same field as these clients. Other clients like Deluge and qBittorrent are FOSS and are hands down the best clients I've used to date. Some of the best software I've used is open source. If the developer has nothing to hide then they should make Tixati FOSS as well. There is absolutely no excuse.