Bittorrent Closes Source Code
Well, let's go back for a little while. Back to bittorrent's infancy. The original bittorrent client, with it's ugly UI and everything. A new file sharing method using a custom http server to find peer, thus creating a very rapid p2p system. The mainline client was the only option for bittorrent clients for a while. Different people had different ideas for bittorrent. Pirates saw it as an amazing new way to distribute their warez, Linux distro vendors saw it as the savior of killer server load, whatever your goal, bittorrent was cool.But it wasn't long before other clients started to fork off. Bittornado, a still existing client forked off fairly early, I used bittorrnado for a while myself, it was basically the mainline client, with a few UI tweaks and some better network power. But a Java client soon became the most popular, Azureus. Now, let's stop for a second. At this time, just about every client in existence was open source, and it looked good for staying that way. Azureus had a long streak of being the most popular client, but it's competition would come.
uTorrent arrived. It's a C++ windows only GUI client, with a very important difference. No source code. uTorrent, in all it's fast starting glory had no source avaliable. By this time, the Bittorrent name had grown much beyond the initial group of enthusiasts, who often became interested in Bittorrent soley because it was open source. uTorrent quickly ate up market share. Azureus now is probably the second most popular bittorrent client even, and that's a hard thing for me to say.
In the mean time, well everyone was arguing about Azureus vs uTorrent, something critical happened. Bittorrent Inc was created. It turned the Bittorrent.com website to a legal movie download web site. Now, I'm not quite sure how paying money and free speech or open source are related, but apparently, they made this poor move. Everyone dropped Azureus vs uTorrent wars (almost) and went to yell at Bittorrent Inc for making this stupid decision. Bittorrent Inc grew, sucking in money, until, they bought up uTorrent. This left many people shocked, scared some away from uTorrent and had trackers banning uTorrent 1.6.1 and onwards. To many people's surprise, the uTorrent source was not quickly spat out like the original Bittorrent idea would have said, but instead Bittorrent Inc has now killed the mainline client and replaced it with a uTorrent based one, saying they did this to prevent malicious productions as their best excuse. Wow. How stupid. Give me _any_ closed source program and I can reverse engineer and hex edit it to say whatever I want instead of what the developer wanted. Closed source does not provide any form of security again here, as I've said before. This has left many people, including myself, angered at the Bittorrent team... is there even a team left? It seems bittorrent has been killed. Totally killed. Mainline has died. Well, here's what I have to say to Bittorrent Inc: Hey, you've still got a chance left to go back to your original goal, stick to free speech over some fucked up corporation.
I don't think I'll be touching uTorrent again, and I recommend other people do the same... SVN LH-ABC seems quite nice :)
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