Azureus Inc. Moves Toward Commercialization 290
SamBob writes "Future releases of the most popular BitTorrent client, Azureus, will come bundled with a 'platform' for media companies to promote their product to Azureus' multi-million users, reports Slyck.com. Azureus Inc., who are the newly formed company behind the Azureus software, plan to generate a profit from the platform in the future, but in the short-term are hoping to help independent film companies find their audience."
Above the radar (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Above the radar (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Above the radar (Score:2)
The bittorent protocol is used a lot of time legitimately - linux ISOs, people sharing their large digital camera files of events with friends, etcetera.
Suing Azureas (or another bittorent company) would be like suing the internet in general, for being something that is used sometimes llegally, by third parties, in some cases. Just like GM could be sued for providing cars to people who use them illegally in some cases (speeding, hit-n-run,
Re:Above the radar (Score:3, Informative)
www.peerimpact.com
"Platform?" (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:"Platform?" (Score:3, Informative)
Re:"Platform?" (Score:2)
I love utorrent. I just wish there was a Linux version or alternative. I used to use the btdownloadcurses, but it becomes cumbersome when you want to leech/seed several torrents at once.
Re:"Platform?" (Score:3, Informative)
Re:"Platform?" (Score:2)
Re:"Platform?" (Score:2)
azureus was written in java last time i checked. to make it worse it used regular swing gui components so it was slow as hell as the result.
i'd prefer a platformed nongui version, preferrably written in C so i wouldn't even notice it running
Re:"Platform?" (Score:3, Informative)
it's your lucky day. rtorrent is written around a very nice C++ library (hence the site name), so you can even hack your own client [rakshasa.no] pretty easily if you don't like that one. and it's really easy on the resources a vast improvement over all the python crazyness (i won't even mention azureus' java `magic'). highly recommended for console junkies. combine that with screen [gnu.org] and you have yourself a fucking tex
Re:"Platform?" (Score:2)
Re:"Platform?" (Score:3, Informative)
Re:"Platform?" (Score:2)
uTorrent Azureus (Score:3, Informative)
Re:"Platform?" (Score:2)
Re:"Platform?" (Score:2)
Actually the wider pattern is :
Build company doing something cool for free to get users.
Whore users off to advertisers.
Users go to next company doing something cool for free.
If you're really lucky you get to sell your company somewhere between steps 2 and 3.
Re:"Platform?" (Score:2)
Re:"Platform?" (Score:2)
Re:"Platform?" (Score:2)
Re:Windows, or Windows + JVM? (Score:2)
Yes. nLite is pretty slick in that regard.
Re:"Platform?" (Score:2)
They're getting greedy, that's all.
Re:"Platform?" (Score:2)
Re:"Platform?" (Score:2)
Re:"Platform?" (Score:5, Informative)
No, you're not alone, you're in the company of all the other commentors that couldn't be bothered to read the article.
This will be a good thing... (Score:4, Insightful)
I believe it'll be a good thing that will help Bittorrent be seen in a better light. I just hope it'll remain as cross-platform as the bittorrent client.
Re:This will be a good thing... (Score:3, Insightful)
The bittorrent n00blets will use the content layered version, the semi-paranoid "OMG teh RIAA" group will use 'Light' offering.
I see no problems here, it might even mean more eyeballs on the AZ source code.
Not a terribly bright idea. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Not a terribly bright idea. (Score:2)
Re:Not a terribly bright idea. (Score:2)
What do they have to lose ? It's not like they're earning money with it at the moment... they're just trying to, if it works, yay for them, it if doesn't, too bad but not much harm done for them (unless the entire development process relied on a future commercialization of Azureus, which I highly doubt...)
Re:Not a terribly bright idea. (Score:2)
Re:Not a terribly bright idea. (Score:2)
It is not easy to tell that Azureus is a Java app...it even comes in a standard executable package for Windows.
Re:Not a terribly bright idea. (Score:2)
In fact, because I'm extremely bored, I'll even re-download it just to give you an idea of where it goes wrong.
This Azureus 2.4.0.2 on OS X:
1) The first thing I see is a configuration wizard. Unfortunately, the buttons and layout are not the same as any OS X wizard.
2) At the same time I get the configuration wizard, I get Azureus Updater which tells me I need to restart. Already I'm confused; do I update first, or do the wizard fi
Get last free version NOW before they switch? NO! (Score:2)
I use Azureus but have been leery of the updates --I like to look at the changelog first rather than mindlessly clicking on the [OK to Autoupdate] button. That's why I'm still using v2.4.0.0 and ignoring the update available for v2.4.0.2.
Reading this Slashdot news today, I decided to try to autoupdate my Azureus (from Help > Check For Updates). It listed two updates with checkboxes that were available: the Core Update v2.4.0.2, and a new version of the Auto-U
Re:Not a terribly bright idea. (Score:2)
Can't I just hide it? I mean, when I download anything from the internet, I click to download, then hide the progress window. The experience was similar when I got OpenOffice and Ubuntu over BitTorrent. If I can just minimize/hide the app, who cares about an ad?
Bram's Client (Score:2)
Re:Bram's Client (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Bram's Client (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Bram's Client (Score:3, Insightful)
Light and resonably featureful.
Re:Bram's Client (Score:2)
Re:Bram's Client (Score:2)
Also I have problems sometimes getting the official client to download from certain sites... sometimes they require some kind of feature or something that the official client doesn't implement and you end up with a download that never starts. I mostly use it on Mac, though, so maybe that's only the Mac version.
Re:Bram's Client (Score:2)
Azureus works like a champ, though, and I've never seen the problems other folks are talking about. It has a fairly hefty memory footprint, yes, and it's not the prettiest thing, but it gets the job done, and I've not noticed memory leaks or increasing cpu usage with it.
Fork. (Score:4, Insightful)
Ah, I see... (Score:5, Insightful)
All you have to do is, say, convince Cartoon Network or Sci-Fi to publish their TV shows (with commercials intact) through Azureus. Users provide most of the bandwidth, content is delivered in a manner that earns providers money, and Azureus takes a slice off the top.
And suddenly we won't see HBO suing for people downloading the latest Sopranos. We'll see HBO distributing episodes for $1-2 to anybody who wants on the private tracker. Or better yet, users simply subscribe to the HBO/Azureus service and can download any available content they want that month and view as they please. Keep the price reasonable and the only pirates you have to battle are the people who wouldn't pay for your service even if they couldn't decrypt your works.
Re:Ah, I see... (Score:2)
Re:Ah, I see... (Score:2)
In 10 years, consumer demand for eminantly portable digital content will be so widespread (and so ingrained because today's youth grew up with mp3s) that companies will adapt or die. A failing business model will fail. That's what it does. The first company to break ranks with MPAA/RIAA will make oodles of money.
well (Score:5, Informative)
Re:well (Score:5, Interesting)
It's really sweet and it's way nicer than VNCing to a Linux desktop filled with BitTorrent clients opened.
Re:well (Score:2)
Re:well (Score:5, Informative)
Re:well (Score:2)
Re:well (Score:2)
VNC is mostly used for a GUI. Many people find it hard to keep a dozen Bittorrent windows open this way.
Re:well (Score:2)
And another vote for rtorrent. I have it running in a (detached) screen session always, monitoring my torrents directory for new files. Sometimes I forget it's even running.
Re:well (Score:2)
Re:well (Score:3, Informative)
Giving up your freedom is too high a price to pay. (Score:5, Insightful)
In part, Azureus and the BitTorrent programs are attractive because they are free software—users are free to run, share, and modify the software. By contrast, uTorrent is non-free software—users can't be sure what they're really running because they can't inspect the program or get others they trust to inspect the software for them. If uTorrent doesn't do what a user wants, changes are difficult to implement (if not effectively impossible) and are not legally allowed besides. Don't think about helping your community by improving uTorrent and distributing the improved version, users can't legally do that either. Despite these restrictions, the uTorrent refers to the situation uTorrent users face as "support [utorrent.com]" in the uTorrent FAQ which frames the issue not from the perspective that users deserve software freedom, but the more narrow developmental goals of the Open Source movement [gnu.org] which merely shrugs slightly disappointedly at proprietary software.
Apparently it takes so little to get some to give up their software freedom, even in circumstances where there are perfectly capable free software programs to do the same job.
Re:Giving up your freedom is too high a price to p (Score:3, Insightful)
I like OSS as much as anyone else but let's judge software on its ability to do the job and its fu
Re:well (Score:2)
Unless you count the fact that the sole developer works for one of the anti-p2p companies that helped take down Suprnova, and he refuses to open the source of his client. Don't you find the desperate pleas on www.utorrent.com very suspicious? utorrent is a brilliant lightweight client but I wouldn't touch it with a 50 foot pole.
http://demodulated.blogspot.com/2006/03/we-are-no t -ased. [blogspot.com]
Re:Greek Note (Score:2)
Re:Greek Note (Score:2)
Re:Greek Note (Score:2, Insightful)
SI uses the symbol to represent the prefix micro.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mu [wikipedia.org]
Anyways, apparently the author pronounces it "you"-torrent [wikipedia.org]. I personally prefer mu torrent.
Re:well (Score:2)
How naive are you?
"Torrent remains closed-source to prevent clones and modifications such as DHT hacks, not to conceal anti-P2P code. Torrent will not become open-source as a result of the controversy over the agreement."
Umm yea, those are great reasons.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
This does not mean advertising (Score:4, Informative)
"Large movie studios and record labels will not be targeted for the project, as the Azureus team do not believe that they are ready yet. "You're not going to see Star Wars or Batman quite yet," joked Rohter."
So basically everybody will be allowed to make a movie, then post it on this platform, and if I will like the "genre" I will just download it... Kindof
Anyway, I think it's premature to judge anything until we see what they've got.
Re:This does not mean advertising (Score:2)
They must be looking on different tracker sites from me.....
Azureus' source may fork here. (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't mind that the team has this desire to profit from their work, they should. But this new development is unfortunate (for we users of current Azureus).
The community who has made Azureus popular has done so because the program is a really novel and effective implementation of the BitTorrent protocol for general purposes. It's supremely useful.
What they (the Azureus team) want to do with it now is very different and more narrowly defined. I don't think they understand that the audience which made their program popular is not necessarily the same (not at all the same IMHO) audience that might enjoy a P2P client with pay-per-download content.
I think many will bail to other general BitTorrent clients, and/or the source of Azureus will fork and a new crop of developers will continue to carry forward the original mission of the program: to make it the best and most portable general BitTorrent implementation.
Good luck Azureus! (Score:2)
Re:Good luck Azureus! (Score:2)
Azureus Above All (Score:2, Insightful)
People need to cut the best (and free as in speech) client some slack. It might use obscene amounts of RAM but when somebody can point me to a client I can run in commandline mode that auto-updates itself, supports DHT, supports regexp scanning RSS feeds, runs on Linux, automatically queues torrents from a given directory, I might consider switching.
Heck, Azureus is worth buying another 512MB stick of RAM for, jus
Re:Azureus Above All (Score:2)
BT clients with RSS? (Score:4, Interesting)
Do any other BT clients offer RSS functionality?
Re:BT clients with RSS? (Score:2, Informative)
It offers all of the features that Azureus supports, with a much faster slicker interface. It is of course, Windows only. I have no idea if it works on WINE. It is also very very small, a single executable file currently 154.44k (The download page doesn't even bother to zip up the exe file)
I always used azureus until I found this beauty. Everyone should give it a shot if they are on Windows.
Re:BT clients with RSS? (Score:4, Informative)
LH-ABC [freeforum101.com] or ABC_OKC [dyndns.org]
Borh of these are forks of the popular python-based open source bittorrent client ABC [sourceforge.net] which runs on Linux (and is itself based on BitTornado which extended from from Original Bittorrent Core System, coded by Bram Cohen). These forks should therefore also in turn run on Linux. LH-ABC and ABC_OKC both have support for RSS.
uTorrent [utorrent.com] a very small and popular closed source Microsoft Windows based bitorrent client. Has extensive support for RSS and can be run on Linux using Wine (I don't know how successfully but I know it can and has been done).
G3 Torrent [sourceforge.net]Another open-source Python based bittorrent client the Original Bittorrent Core System, coded by Bram Cohen. It has support for RSS and runs on Linux (I think).
Rufus [sourceforge.net] Another open-source Python based bittorrent client (based on G3 Torrent) with support for RSS and runs on Linux (I think).
ZipTorrent [ziptorrent.com] Another closed source (and supposedly small) Microsoft Windows based bitorrent client. Has support for RSS, other than that I don't know anything about it.
Well... (Score:2, Insightful)
Ok, time to search for a new bittorrent client. (Score:3, Insightful)
Typical Slashdot response (Score:3, Insightful)
I dislike a lot of what corporations do as much as the next person, but do we really need this kneejerk response that anybody who wants to make *any* money at all is declared soulless, ravening evil?
People need to eat, and they generally also want to do a lot of other things...and last I checked, food and most of said other things usually cost money. That has to come from somewhere, and what I really think is wrong is the idea that the only morally legitimate means of earning it is sitting in a cubicle like a battery chicken for eight (or however many more) hours a day.
If you're going to come back at me with the "donation" response as well, don't bother. I'm aware that the only real reason why 98% of the readership of this site believe that making money from software is evil is because Richard Stallman said so...not because they themselves actually have a reason for said belief.
Yes, the corporate rampage in a lot of different areas is a problem...but kneejerk, mindless Communism is too. They're both extremes, and they're both equally undesirable. RMS is as much a destructive fanatic in his own way as Gates or Ballmer are in theirs. Both sides want to remake the world in *their* own image, and to hell with what anybody else wants.
A lot of people here pride themselves on being intellectuals...but sometimes, some of you really don't act like it.
Re:Time to use a different client (Score:2)
Today's the day I make the switch to uTorrent [utorrent.com]. It's a single executable file less than 160 kb in size.
Re:Time to use a different client (Score:2)
Re:Time to use a different client (Score:2)
Re:I can only hope (Score:5, Informative)
I am not sure how much of this is due to Azureus and how much to SWT, but whatever the cause the result is a completely unusable product.
Re:I can only hope (Score:3, Interesting)
Virtual PC? (Score:3, Informative)
On other systems... uTorrent running on Wine? Virtual Machine?
Do you seriously think Mac OS X + Microsoft Virtual PC + Microsoft Windows XP + uTorrent has a smaller footprint than Mac OS X + JVM + Azureus?
Re:I can only hope (Score:2)
Replace Azureus (Score:2)
Re:Replace Azureus (Score:3, Insightful)
Your computer must fail it. (Score:2, Interesting)
ben 267 6.1 14.0 540848 127992 ?? S 6Apr06 4258:54.27
After running for 23 days (and 44GB of transfers), activity monitor reports 124MB of real memory, 528MB of virtual.
Dividing the CPU time by the number of minutes it's been running yields 12.8% average CPU usage.
This is on a G4 1GHz with 896MB of ram.
I've never seen the cpu utilization issue or
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:I can only hope (Score:2)
Re:I can only hope (Score:3, Insightful)
I am not su
Re:I can only hope (Score:3, Informative)
Your experience is not congruent with mine.
I use it on OSX, have been for 3 years now. The GUI isn't perfect, yes, that's true, but I don't much care. It has the features I want exposed, even if it did take slightly longer to find them all. The interface is definitely a bit slow too, I'll grant... but it's no big deal.
It does take a nice big chunk of memory, but I haven't experienced any 'leaks' and CPU usage, while significant, is stable. I generally close it if I'm going to play an FPS or the like, b
Re:I can only hope (Score:2)
Re:I can only hope (Score:3, Interesting)
This is a utility program, not a beauty pageant contestant.
It's got a job to do. It does it, as well or better than any other option.
The GUI isn't pretty, but it is superbly functional. Just about anything you might ever need to do with a
And I disagree that it's a 'bad interface' - it's just not a particularly pretty one. A *bad interface*, to me, would be one that doesn
Re:I can only hope (Score:3, Interesting)
Lies. Azureus is great for what i use it for. Upnp support, encryption, graphical swarm trees, the ability to download only from specific seeders/peers, the ability to throttel my speeds at will...The list goes on. Alot of people say azureus is bloated, but those people have not availed of azureus` full range of features. It more than deserves it's place at the top of the list. However, i am nervous as to this "advertising" that's going to be i
Re:Isn't this like the local... (Score:2)
Please do not assume bittorrent == illegal. Much as the RIAA don't want you to know it, it's the content that counts.
Re:'platform'=spyware (Score:2)
Re:Azureus (Score:2)
Re:Azureus (Score:2)
Re:missing a step (Score:2, Insightful)
Given my non-leaky experience, I'm not convinced that the problem is with Azureus or Java. With Azureus grabbing about 0.5GB of RAM, that may be exposing leaks in your OS's VM. Or possibly the UI toolkit, which is the other thing that differs from
Re:missing a step (Score:3, Insightful)