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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.'"

4 of 189 comments (clear)

  1. on IRC by Don+Negro · · Score: 5, Informative

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

    --

    Don Negro
    Perl 6 will give you the big knob. -- Larry Wall

  2. Re:Azureus by Sarusa · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

  3. Re:Back up your copies by TheShadowzero · · Score: 4, Informative

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

    --
    If history repeats itself, why can't we study the future?
  4. irc chat log: with ludde and bram by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

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

    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)