If you're new here, you may want to subscribe via RSS feed or Email. Thank you for visiting!

BitTorrent Inc. has just bought (merged with) the popular BitTorrent client, uTorrent for an undisclosed sum. Opinions of many people are split into two about this merger. One of the good side of this merger is that the possibility of MAC OS X and linux support while some say that it may become a bloatware and adware client. For me as long as uTorrent won’t be adware and bloatware then that would be fine with me.

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)

Official Announcement: uTorrent Forum

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 9th, 2006 at 2:35 am and is filed under Software, The Internet. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.