this is a very cool service and makes bittorrent publishing extremely easy. it never has been in the past and allows bittorrent to take on akamai in the server offload arena

The studios probably came back to them and said your open source client wont cut it with our legal and security requirements.

So Bittorent Inc. brought out the closed source competition .

And I’m sure device manufacturers would rather deal with code that is written in C++ and assembler like uTorrent is that trying to port Pyton onto a chip.

The users that are complaining about uTorrent being acquired by Bittorent are worried because many think that Bittorent Inc is owned by the MPAA (which it is not) and the Studios will force Bittorent Inc to put backdoor code so uTorrents users copyright infringement activities can be tracked .

This is total paranoia on their part and if Bittorrent and if the Studios did place a back-door in a Bittorrent client I’m sure a security researcher would release a public statement about such activity , just as Ed Fenton did with the Sony rootkit scandal .

Bittorent also may also need a closed secure secure client so they can distribute Hollywood movies in a secure environment so the Studios and Bittorrent Inc can use the DCMA and EULAs when the client or content is compromised

I think the main reason is that Bram probably felt that his client was done and complete. You probably have a point that they were looking at commercial extensions like Cache Discovery Protocol rather than focussing on the users. Even so, Mainline hasn’t been a popular choice for more than two years.

Further points: (i) the Mainline UI needed a lot of work that it’s only received in the last few months (remember, Cohen is a programmer and a linux geek, not a gui designer); (ii) much of the innovation that’s come in bittorrent over the last year has been on items which Cohen didn’t agree with – in particular, protocol encryption to let users get round traffic shaping.

The BT Inc company has been focussed on exploiting the brand name and trying to strike deals with the big media companies rather than making a good client. They’ve been in real need of content for some time. But I think this deal shows that they really needed more investment in client dev. Take a look at this to get an idea of how a good client would have brought them users anyway…

perhaps they were spending a lot of time developing extensions to the platform for their commercial clients. that makes absolute sense.

Mainline is the ‘official’ bittorrent client. Has always had that name.

Anyway, while Bram has always had the vision and the genius to design the protocol in the first place, the Mainline UI has until recently always been absolutely hands-down AWFUL. It hasn’t been used by most users for years, not just the last year. Plus the client has been buggy since about version 4 and the DHT has never worked properly.

Ludde built uTorrent from scratch, deliberately not relying on any libraries to ensure it was the smallest client possible. Since version 1.2 or so, it’s been a joy to use. BitTorrent Inc won’t care much about the piracy fan boys on the utorrent forums. they’ll care about the day to day users they now have access to through the bought client.