(02-03-2014, 02:36 AM)magnum Wrote:(02-01-2014, 10:37 PM)Kuci Wrote: I'm sure open source community would make hashcat even bigger than it is now.
There are plenty of competing projects that are open source. If you are right, then why is oclHashcat the leader? I'm all for open source but the "community" seems to have failed in this case.
There are several factors. Hashcat is under active development by a group of active active devs and is heavily optimized. Second, it's uniform on all supported platforms. Next, is comes with classic GNU-like CLI UI. UI is very important, we don't need any silly GUI nor messy CLI like JtR has.
And if you talk about that community seems to have failed... Well, community wasn't even tryin'. It's all about interest of contributors and professionality of maintainers. For example, one contributor may be interested in adding an OpenCL kernel, but not in adding the same kernel written in CUDA. Then some contributors may not be interested in adding some algorithms/features at all and so.
If I have to say something as a dev, I wanted to contribute into JtR in the past, but I found this project messy and not very mature. It's typical example of project with low management. You would make hashcat as messy project as JtR is if you wouldn't set any conventions that must be met in the code and merging all the code, no matter if the code is clean, if it meets the set conventions and so.
However, managing such a project correctly is not that big deal. It can be easily done when you have right people in your team and you're uncompromised. Look at Cyanogenmod. It's typical example of a big project with good contribution managing. I'm a Cyanogenmod contributor and I find the code clean, meets all the conventions set by Google or Cyanogenmod and that's why it's so stable despite it's an aftermarket distribution of Android.
I'd write much more, but I ran out of my spare time
