Open Source & BitTorrent Clients

While the legitimacy of bit torrent can be argued till we're both blue in the face, i would like to put all that aside and write about the clients. Any torrent going individual has a lot to say about organizations that may disrupt their traffic, but I don't want to write about that either -- maybe later. I thought I would get critical on the clients. Its probably just paranoia... alright, it is just paranoia, but I can't help but think this system is marked for destruction.

A few months (years) back, Bit torrent clients were nearly all open sourced -- just like the protocol. But as of late, things certainly have changed. I'm not someone that 'dislikes' or 'fears' change, just the bad kind. Lets start with the clear No. 1 client: uTorrent. uTorrent was a complete Open Source Success. And now... well, much has gone left unchanged, except it has been bought out by BitTorrent Inc. and is now closed sourced -- has any wondered what closed source code has been added in to it? The Bit Torrent (client) from Bit Torrent Inc. (yuck) surprisingly remains open sourced, but has undergone heavy commercialization... and Vuze (once Azureus) has gone from being a Java based, resource hungry client to... oh wait... lol... never mind. We still know Vuze is still a heavy weight, but it has also became Bit Torrent's twin in terms of the commercial aspect (Look closely and you'll see the word "price" and the acronym "DRM" on that page).

My point is that most developers that now produce these clients, are no longer in it for the end users. They have slowly been adding to the protocol, and trying to commercialize/monetize their efforts. And what better way to earn money if you could catch, report, and track piracy through the very program you make, that everyone uses.

While i know this sounds silly, but at least give it some thought. Slowly, these developers have made changes to the bit torrent protocol, usually to our own benefit. And while most of these non-standard additions we either over look, or use without a thought second, what happens when the 'new gen' of clients start having problems with the 'old gen'... A lot of people today use these new clients... easily over 95%. Clearly, It shouldn't be difficult to add some feature that could be monitored traffic, media etc., or take away the anonymity of an individual.

How should i say this... Will we see a point where the new gen pushes the old gen out... to the point where it may not be functional? If were trying to kill torrent sites left and right, then who needs to visit a site for the .torrent then when you could visit your friend? If he is... in deed a trustworthy friend.

I decided today to no longer use uTorrent... I will be finishing up my remaining downloads, and from here on, i will use deluge as my main client. I also looked at Halite, but it needs a lot of work still.