BitTorrent, Inc. Acquires µTorrent

[Super5]

Well people don't have to use micro-torrent... I use Azureus and I hope business interests, and the MPAA especially, keep their dirty paws off it. However, I'm worried that as BitTorrent becomes more mainstream, the industry will change its opinion and that memo of understanding will go right out the window. Torrent databases are already under attack (Pirate Bay, Torrentspy, isohunt, and probably more). My biggest fear is that BitTorrent will be forced to incorporate some kind of anti-piracy measures into the torrent protocol itself. Then torrents will die, and it will be a sad day indeed.

[Kraco]

My biggest fear is that BitTorrent will be forced to incorporate some kind of anti-piracy measures into the torrent protocol itself. Then torrents will die, and it will be a sad day indeed.

I'd guess that would lead into a divergence producing a commercial torrent format with the anti-piracy shit, and then the normal torrent protocol used by independent clients and the kind of sites we use. After all, if the anime sites (and equivalent) and clients automatically implemented that kind of new protocol, they would kill themselves.

I don't know if the maker of utorrent lost all control over the program, but I suppose he made a sum of money out of this and considered it worth it, even if it eventually leads to the death of his creation.

[masamuneehs]

all good things come to an end. uTorrent is the best client out there imho, but this joining with a corporation reeks of promises of reform and seeking legitimacy. An ominous sign for pirates... i'll keep with the u until they stop being awesome, but i have no doubt when that time comes another good client will be available, it's just the way the web works

[complich8]

Anti-commercialism and anti-corporatism run rampant here ... now all we need is a drum circle, some tie-dyed shirts and some hash and we're all set. >_>

If you read just a little bit about what happened and how it happened, the creator hasn't lost control of the app. It's just that he's agreed to let utorrent be used in commercial contexts, and help develop for that. So, stuff like embedded systems.

Now, personally, I don't see torrenting to embedded systems as a sane thing at the moment, but ... who knows what the future holds. I also still don't view video ipods as viable .

More to the point, the structure they're talking about is basically taking the good things in utorrent and porting them to other places, not taking other places' demands and adding them to utorrent. The nice thing about everyone's favorite torrent client is that it's very complete and very clean -- there's not a whole lot that you could reasonably add to enhance the experience, and there's not a whole lot that you could reasonably take away without damaging it. I think Bram recognized both that and the fact that his own python-based client (mainline) doesn't do most of what utorrent does and isn't getting sane implementations of most of those features any time soon. It's probably easier to acquire utorrent than it is to hire on the programming expertise to write a comparable client.

Azureus is a fairly feature-rich alternative, but the memory overhead of running the jre and running an SWT app on top of it is pretty prohibitive, and I don't really see it as a viable alternative. But there is a lot of work being done on libtorrent, and the way I see it if there were some deep functional flaw with utorrent, the community would pull together another very reasonable functional client within a couple weeks.

Lastly, don't be so alarmist. If things go sour, things go sour and you switch to something else. If they don't, they don't. The future's up in the air, and your ability to download stolen stuff from the internet has never been a certainty. It may be that this is our golden age and that golden age will pass... who knows?

[Board of Command]

The golden age will never pass. They may sink our vessels but they can't drain the sea.

[Lucifus]

The golden age will never pass. They may sink our vessels but they can't drain the sea.

Keeping that quote till I die. Viva la resistance!

I never tried uTorrent. It really that good?

[Kraco]

I never tried uTorrent. It really that good?

It's the best client right now. It has an UI and functionality at least as good as Azureus and BitComet, yet takes only a small fraction of the memory and CPU time those programs need.

[ChaosK]

Keeping that quote till I die. Viva la resistance!

I never tried uTorrent. It really that good?

What are you using?

[BioAlien]

Keeping that quote till I die. Viva la resistance!

I never tried uTorrent. It really that good?

utorrent use really low place on the HD and even if you are downloading at 200kb/s you won't lag(if you do, it is still less than other popular torrent client like azureus.)
and also use most of the time less then 8 000 ko memory.


I just hope they won't ruin this awesome torrent client.