James Delahunty
7 Dec 2006 10:11
Bram Cohen of BitTorrent Inc. has announced that the company has acquired the increasingly popular µTorrent client. The announcement was made on µTorrent's official site by Bram and Ludvig (Ludde) Strigeus, the writer of µTorrent.
Together, we are pleased to announce that BitTorrent, Inc. and µTorrent AB have decided to join forces. BitTorrent has acquired µTorrent as it recognized the merits of µTorrent's exceptionally well-written codebase and robust user community. Bringing together µTorrent'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.
No further details of the acquisition have been made public. As you can see by just visiting the announcement thread, the news immediately brought in some negative/worried comments from µTorrent users. BitTorrent technology is used heavily for copyright infringement but BitTorrent Inc. is on the road to establishing a legitimate multimedia distribution center built around the same technology that is vastly used for piracy.
What does this mean for the µTorrent community? Not much, at least not at first. The intention is to maintain the website as it is, and keep the forums and community active. Moving forward behind the scenes, we will continue to develop µTorrent and will be using the codebase in other applications, especially ones where a fast, lightweight implementation is more suitable, such as embedded systems on TVs, cell phones, and other non-PC platforms.
The existent µTorrent and BitTorrent communities are immensely valuable to us, which is why we are announcing this here first to make sure you're all the first to know about the news. The plan is to continue to foster the health and growth of the community that has been critical to the success of µTorrent. Thank you in advance for your support.
Bram and Ludde
The benefits of using BitTorrent to distribute data are obvious. Every day terabytes of data are exchanged between users, making up for a large portion of the overall Internet traffic and prompting ISPs to attempt to block its use. This reliable and quick way of distributing very large files is already used extensively for legitimate purposes also, and the MPAA is set to give it a go through its dealings with BitTorrent Inc.
Source:
µTorrent