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.'"

Ahhh...

[Anonymous Coward]

uTorrent. My favourite bittorrent client.

Now THAT programmer is someone who cares about quality.

The end?

[blueCommand]

Let's hope it's not the end of a perfectly fine BT client. Maybe I've lived long enough with the embrace, extend, extingush thing, but this doesn't feel that good :(

Re:Leave it alone!

[0siris]

So why worry? If you keep the build you have right now I doubt it'll be incompatible with torrents any time soon. What I have right now does the job fine, and I don't really need any new features.

Time to turn off

[Anonymous Coward]

the automatic updates in uTorrent. Not that I dont trust the nice people at BitTorrent Inc., of course, it's just that...yeah...sometimes off is better.

There's Goes the Neighborhood

[Nom du Keyboard]

I liked uTorrent because it wasn't Bittorrent. An alternative supplier with a great client who wasn't in bed with the MPAA. Makes me wonder if MPAA money was behind this acquisition.

Reminds me of the time when Microsoft couldn't compete with another x86 assembler on the market. They bought it out, and rather than use it to replace the relatively awful MASM, killed it instead.

Will uTorrent face the same fate? Can we all make money by writing a better BT than BT and taking money for it afterwards now?

Re:The end?

[Christopher_Edwardz]

I thought the very same thing when I read the title.

uTorrent was an awesome piece of software. It.just.worked. It was small, non-invasive, and non-evilware.

My heart sank.

I have no faith that this would be anything other than the death of uTorrent as a usable client.

(Same as winamp years ago, same as winternals, same as ... the list goes on.)

Oh well, which client does one use next?

Re:That's not all

[Anonymous Coward]

For fuck's sake, slashdot really should allow unicode. Pretend there's a \u00B5 before the third word of my previous post.

Back up your copies

[ZDRuX]

Ladies and gentleman, maybe it's time you start archiving all the current and future version of uTorrent incase they decide to implement "features" you don't want. Having a copy sit somewhere on CD isn't a bad idea anyway. I have personally tried uTorrent and don't like it, and went back to Azureus. Mainly because I have gotten too used to the interface, and it's open-source project so I know what I`m getting.

Re:With you kind permission ...

[Anonymous Coward]

If you want a fast, feature-full, GPL console client,try rTorrent [wikipedia.org].

I switched to it after using the ncurses/shadow client since the beginning, managing multiple torrents isn't easy with the official client, even using screen.

Re:Leave it alone!

[danomac]

...don't forget to turn off the auto update feature, if it has one. I used to use uTorrent before switching over to linux, and I don't remember if it has an auto-updater like some other clients do.

Re:Explanation request

[rmerry72]

What motivates that fear?

I think the fear is that the featureful, small uTorrent client the world loves will now be "improved" to provide fast dollars for the new owners. And how do you do that these days? Stuff advertsing into your product, turn off advanced features and produce a "pro" version, "encourage" your community to download your commercial stuff, and when they resist then automatically "upgrade" their client for them to follow the new "strategic direction".

The uTorrent community is the biggest "asset" that BitTorrent bought, just like the BitTorrent community was what MPAA thought it was buying. Now that community will be "leveraged" to provide a significant return on this "investment".

In short, commericalisation. It is the way of things. Not that I blame or hold a grudge against the authors. They put a lot of work in and why shouldn't they profit. Any developer in their place would do the same. Its business, that's all, just business. But people, particularly on /. get quite righteous about these things.

The ride was good. Now pay or get off. Capitalism 101.

Re:This could turn bad...

[LordSnooty]

how will this affect the privacy of current Torrent users such as myself? I have to admit I'm a bit worried. It doesn't come as a big surprise though.

The answer is, use an OSS client like Azureus - which would be forked immediately if something like this happened.

Re:How will this affect their user base?

[LordLucless]

Most people that use uTorrent, use it based on the predicate that it allows for more privacy

I've never heard of anyone using it for that reason. Personally, I use it primarily for it's feature-set and small footprint, and its on that basis that I recommend it to others.

Re:This could turn bad...

[badenglishihave]

Hardly my point. The privacy that concerns me now is any kind of software embedded into future versions of uTorrent. Obviously you will not have to use uTorrent if you choose not. But if Cohen has a handle on what goes into the client there is a possibility of tracking searches, monitoring filenames, reporting torrents with unrecognized hashes of movies, etc. It's stuff like this that current uTorrent users need to be made aware of.

Re:Mod parent up

[Anonymous Coward]

Why is it that people involved in Internet piracy seem to mostly be half a step away from "No! You can't play in my club!"? Maybe we should start up nohomerstorrents.com. And I feel your pain about the clients - I've been forced to dedicate most of my server CPU and RAM to keeping azureus up because of their idiotic policies.

Re:Leave it alone!

[Anonymous Coward]

It does. I just shut it off on mine.

Re:bleh

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't blame him for not releasing the source (it's his right), nor do I blame him for selling out (I would). It's still a shame, though, because I really liked uTorrent.

1. Make uTorrent as feature-rich as the official client
2. Add more partner-sponsored addons during installation that are checked by default
3. Profit!

(There is no "???" step since this model seems to actually work)

Re:With you kind permission ...

[jcarkeys]

Azureus takes up an absolutely insane amount of RAM and runs very, very slowly. I'm very sad that uTorrent is gone down. I guess I'll be sticking with version 1.6 for quite some time now.

Re:The end?

[Crunchie Frog]

How about just stick with the existing version and don't upgrade?