BitTorrent Goes Closed Source
This post was published 2 years 3 months 12 days ago and its content may not be valid anymore.Popular online file sharing utility, Bit Torrent, has closed the source on both their application and source code.
There are two issues people need to come to grips with,” BitTorrent CEO Ashwin Narvin told Slyck.com. “Developers who produce open source products will often have their product repackaged and redistributed by businesses with malicious intent. They repackage the software with spyware or charge for the product. We often receive phone calls from people who complain they have paid for the BitTorrent client.” As for the protocol itself, that too is closed, but is available by obtaining an SDK license.
I think making the software available as an SDK will not hamper the development of other alternative clients, but it is a shame to see more and more open source projects go private.
Given that practically nobody uses the original BitTorrent client anyway, it would seem to me that the torrentosphere (I just made up a new word!) will be largely unaffected by this.