BitTorrent, Inc. Acquires uTorrent

ColinPL writes "BitTorrent, Inc. has taken the next step — the acquisition of uTorrent. In a joint announcement made today, the two firms have publicly solidified the merger. 'Together, we are pleased to announce that BitTorrent, Inc. and uTorrent AB have decided to join forces ... BitTorrent has acquired uTorrent as it recognized the merits of uTorrent's exceptionally well-written codebase and robust user community. Bringing together uTorrent's efficient implementation and compelling UI with BitTorrent's expertise in networking protocols will significantly benefit the community with what we envision will be the best BitTorrent client.'"

on IRC

[Don Negro]

Bram and Ludde are answering questions on #utorrent-questions -- irc.p2p-network.net

Re:This could turn bad...

[anss123]

Hate to say this, but torrent downloads are not anonymous. They can track your IP address, and can find out who you are from there.

Re:This could turn bad...

[SpecBear]

...how will this affect the privacy of current Torrent users such as myself?

It won't. It's BitTorrent, you already have no privacy. Your IP address is readily available to anyone who cares to look.

Re:Azureus

[Anonymous Coward]

Azureus is written in Java, this implies high CPU usage and eating up RAM. Up to a point where my computer was getting all choppy n shitty because there were no resources left for the OS and other programs.
Enter utorrent, a small and nibble program doing everything I wanted without eating my computer alive.
I told everyone who bitched about Azureus to get utorrent and they were happy ever since.

Re:Leave it alone!

[Don Negro]

If that's your concern, use the official BitTorrent client [bittorrent.com].

It's Open Source, written in Python, and the code is there for you to see.

Re:Azureus

[Sarusa]

If you need all the features of Azureus there's nothing else that can match it.

On the other hand, uTorrent does just about every damn thing most people need and it does it in 1/10th the CPU usage and 1/100th the memory usage of Azureus.

I like never having to worry about whether my torrent program is running in the background while I'm doing foreground tasks so I love uTorrent. I just leave it on all the time, running away, and never even notice it while I'm playing NWN2 or editing photos or watching videos or whatever. And that's the big win.

Re:Back up your copies

[TheShadowzero]

ZDRuX, meet http://oldversion.com/ [oldversion.com]. OldVersion.com, meet ZDRuX

Re:Leave it alone!

[sxtxixtxcxh]

Q: Will the uTorrent code base be released into the open source?

A: The uTorrent code base will remain closed source.

from: http://forum.utorrent.com/viewtopic.php?id=17280 [utorrent.com]

Re:Leave it alone!

[thepotoo]

uTorrent phones home for the DHT network feature; it's pretty important if you care about speed.
Shut down the uTorrent central server, and you've effectively halved (or worse) everyone's download/upload speed.

It's a serious problem; if it happens there could be an alternate server, but it would require third party hacks.

irc chat log: with ludde and bram

[Anonymous Coward]

http://digg.com/tech_news/BitTorrent_merges_with_u Torrent [digg.com]

Some answers from #uTorrent-questions:

-will uTorrent be ported to Linux?
probably

-how many lines of code is it comprised of?
~50-60K

-will encryption be removed?
no (answered by Bram)

-features most important to you (directed @ Bram)
low memory footprint, code size, cpu usage

-is there any thoughts to an osx client?
(Bram) we plan to produce an up to date osx client, but that's significant porting work

-are there any features that will be removed from uTorrent?
(Bram) we're leaving the uTorrent client mostly alone for now, on the grounds that people like it (further defined 'mostly' as in, not much of anything substantive will change)

-will uTorrent be replacing the original python client?
(Bram) we aren't announcing integration plan details right now

-Bram, are you talking with asus and other router makers for putting uTorent in there?
(Bram) we're talking to lots of people

-will uTorrent ever be open-sourced?
(Bram) not in the forseeable future, but we'll continue to maintain an open source reference implementation

-Bram, you said before that you're not a big fan of protocol header encryption... do you still stand behind this?
(Bram) it isn't much harder for an isp to recognize encrypted headers than unencrypted headers.

-will content be monitored?
(Bram) absolutly not

-does the uTorrent codebase compile on linux today (in your labs?)
(ludde) No

-ludde can't develop anything new for uTorrent?
(ludde) bittorrent inc will do the majority of the development work

-what IDE was uTorrent developed on?
(ludde) Microsoft Visual C++ 6.0 with a few routines written in visual cobol. uTorrent was written in C++ with some tiny chunks of assembly

-will uTorrent continue to be free?
(Bram) utorrent will continue to be available and continue to be free (as in, no cost, not open source)

-Utorrent uses a lot of Windows API's right? Won't that be a problem when porting to *nux/OSX
(ludde) Yes, the UI is tightly bound to Windows APis, however, the core backend is easier to port.
(Bram) the utorrent UI is windows native, so porting that part to osx or linux is a significant amount of work (but planned to be done at some point)

Re:That's not all

[fohat]

It's the new anti (alt+0220)ber geek code they implemented with the last CSS update. Remain Calm, all is well!

Re:irc chat log: with ludde and bram

[Umbrae]

As he said, it was C++ with small bits of assembly. He probably just used the Visual COBOL IDE to write the assembly.

Re:bleh

[ScrewMaster]

uTorrent was written by one guy by the name of Ludvig Strigeus, not some random dudes. He's Swedish, I think. One of the sharper coders on the planet, I'd say. Anyway, he never wanted to release the source because ... he didn't want to release the source. No particular reason why he should have, really. This idea that every programmer that does something way cool somehow owes the community his source code is just silly. He gave away a hot product for free, that's good enough for me.

Not that I wouldn't mind taking a look at that codebase. You know, just for curiosity's sake.

Re:With you kind permission ...

[Anonymous Coward]

The most *promising* project looks like BTG (http://btg.berlios.de/ [berlios.de]) based on Rasterbar's libtorrent
(http://www.rasterbar.com/products/libtorrent/inde x.html [rasterbar.com]) (not to be confused with Rakshasa's libtorrent and rtorrent). It's a daemon that supports DHT (rtorrent doesn't) and has multiple front ends (e.g. web, ncurses, GTK gui) though XML-RPC. It seems to be the most flexible torrent client, ideal for the power user.

Unfortunately packages are not available in Debian repositories for either libtorrent or BTG (although Deluge, which uses libtorrent, is available?).

Re:Azureus

[timelessroguestar]

have you ever tried playing games in the background with Azureus open? With uTorrent you can play nearly any game with no noticeable performance penalty unless it's a hard drive happy game. uTorrent is so efficient that it uses fewer CPU cycles than my application firewall, that's impressive.

Re:This could turn bad...

[Crayon Kid]

I've been with BitComet for a while, I suffered through the tracker bans, and quite frankly if tracker operators think it wise to exclude people based on their software preference, it's really their loss because I can go elsewhere.

They don't ban clients just because of "software preference". Usually that client does something bad or dumb, which causes problems and unneeded extra bandwidth consumption for the tracker, for the peers or for everybody. Gratuitous extra bandwidth consumption in a piece of software whose main purpose is to reduce it is pretty stupid, you have to admit.

Furthermore, the BitComet client had its history of acting like an asshole, ignoring tracker restrictions, not respecting private flags and so on. And that's just bad form.