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?