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Azureus Inc. Moves Toward Commercialization
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."
In the current anti p2p world, i dont think thats such a good idea. Now they will be a direct target.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Am I the only one who thinks that this really means that it is going to be the next Kazaa?
English is easier said than done.
As long as there is no way the same media companies can track what you download elsewhere, I don't see the problem in this. Is Azereus open source? If it is there won't really be a way to hide snooping software in there.
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.
If they make it annoying at all, what's to prevent people from switching to the slew of other BT apps out there? Given the fact that advertising is almost always made to catch the eye, it'll have a hard time not annoying users. Frankly, I'd switch to something else even if it was a static clickable banner.
Fill in your four or five-letter word of wisdom here _ _ _ _ _.
The client is open source, no?
I too have felt the cold finger of injustice.
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.
The road to tyranny has always been paved with claims of necessity.
So, how long before someone will start an ad-free fork?
You should give uTorrent a try if you like a small elegant client. I switched from the original BitTorrent to BitTornado to uTorrent, which I think is the best one out there right now.
houghi@penne : sh utorrent.exe
utorrent.exe: utorrent.exe: cannot execute binary file
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
I think this is a bad move for the Azureus team. The need to make some money is turning the team away from building the best generalized BitTorrent implementation, so that it can become something that can generate some cash. I think that will ultimately kill it in it's new form, but it's present for may live on under new developers.
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.
USNG: 14TPU4605
Azureus is a great piece of software. uTorrent might be functional enough, but it's no Azureus.
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, just so you can get files at a reasonable speed from a reasonably large userbase. Frankly I'm alarmed people would rather use proprietary software that is written by somebody that works with an anti-p2p company. Who knows what uTorrent has in it?
I'll just have to remember to not upgrade it anymore.
The 'u' in utorrent is the greek small letter mu and is pronounced "mew" or "myoo".
SI uses the symbol to represent the prefix micro.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mu
Anyways, apparently the author pronounces it "you"-torrent. I personally prefer mu torrent.
I've only used it on OS X, and here it is a travesty. The GUI doesn't do live resizing (unlike every other OS X app). You often need to do a small resize to persuade the GUI to actually draw in the right place. The widgets don't behave quite like the ones that look the same in other apps. After an hour or so of use, it climbs to over 0.5GB of RAM usage (in-core size, not just VM size). It somehow seems to leak CPU - after a couple of hours it will be using 100% of my CPU for no observable reason.
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.
I concur. I had the exact same experience and thus concluded that it was unusable.
I get punished all the time around here when I bash Java, but Azureus is yet another example where it just seems to be true that Java for cross platform GUI platform lives up to the saying "write once, debug everywhere". Matlab, SAS, Wordperfect, Oracle Universal Installer, you name it, I get the email or phone call saying "Its broken again...". People defend Java saying that nobody on the planet knows how to do Java correctly, and that is the problem. They are probably correct. Now, mod me down.
Maybe, but it does go to show why Java's "write once run anywhere" philosophy never really took off on the desktop. I really shouldn't need to double my computer's memory to run a communications program, and while one might be tempted to think that "well, that's what it takes to run a sophisticated Torrent client" there's programs like uTorrent which provide substantially the same capabilities with a tiny fraction of the resources. Besides, when it comes to the GUI world, most people like something that is actually coded for their GUI, uses that GUI's capabilities well, and is not just an approximation. The reality is that when it comes to cross-platform functionality the communications protocols are much more important than the application, and there you do see a lot of co-operation between the various Torrent client vendors.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Exactly. uTorrent isn't Free and Open. It's not in the same ballpark as a client like Azureus anyway; Azureus is aimed at the user looking for features. You're not gonna get many Azureus to uTorrent converts.
I've never seen Azureus leak memory, and I run it for weeks at a time. Ubuntu 5.10, Sun JRE 1.5.0+update06, Azureus 2.4.0.2, Stuffer plugin. It does grab a hefty chunk of RAM, but that amount is stable on my system. Even for the 50GB torrent I once downloaded!
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 platform to platform.
I don't doubt that you are seeing a problem. Others have similar complaints. But it just might be that Azureus and Java are stressing your system in ways that are exposing other flaws.
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" 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 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.
Digital Citizen
I use an old celeron running windows with azureus and a bunch of plugins as a remote downloader. The web interface and automatic queing are huge time savers. The system's uptime is measured in weeks with Azureus running 24/7 with no slowdowns. No complaints here!
What post? The one you're carrying inside your rusty innards!
Thank you very much Azureus. Good luck.
rTorrent
Light and resonably featureful.
I wish to remain anomalous
Sure, non free software is never absolutely trustworthy, but if 10 million people are using it, that's good enough for me. Maybe it shouldn't be, but it is. "I can see the source" is not the singular way to build trust. I already copped to open source software being easier to trust.
The other point I was reaching for was that if the benefits of using closed(non free, whatever) software outweigh the benefits I derive from the community you speak of(they often do), then the rational thing to do(assuming I don't place a large intrinsic value on software-libre itself) is to use the closed software.
If the choice is between exactly equivalent software except that one is open and one is closed, open is clearly the better choice. For software that isn't exactly equivalent, the choice is less clear; I'm not sure exactly how much my 'software freedom' is worth. My behavior suggests that I don't place too high a value on it.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
I like OSS as much as anyone else but let's judge software on its ability to do the job and its functionality, shall we? Any BT client that uses less processing power than a half-decent firewall is commendable IMO. I trust a developer that can write a good client and appease the user community more than OSS developers and its community deluded about how good their client is. Surely it must be my computer's fault that it is old hardware and cannot handle the BT protocol and traffic.
When I used to use Azureus it basically put my computer to a stand-still as far as doing anything else. Ever since I switched from Azureus to uTorrent, I never looked back. I can do anything else that my computer is able to do; including playing the most demanding games my computer can handle. That's the whole point of uTorrent. I don't think any other client beats it on any performance metric.
Timeless Rogue Star - Defile Convention - Transcend Time, Life, the Universe, and Everything.
Whenever it's learned on here that someone wants to actually get paid for what they do, they're immediately branded as the spawn of Satan.
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.