Huh, I never saw this coming. The original bittorrent client, while still in active development, was eclipsed by third-party torrent clients pretty quickly after torrents became popular. I used Shadow’s for a long time, due to it’s speed and it was one of the first to utilize many modern features, such as adjusting bandwidth per torrent, and tweaking network settings. but eventually I went to more user-friendly apps when they got more robust, such as ABC and Azureus. When µTorrent came about it was absolutely perfect: snappy, highly configurable, and an extremely tight UI.
Now it appears that the original and the best have merged. This sounds like a good thing (especially in that sentence), but I fear for the future of µTorrent.
This is Bram Cohen, the creator of the BitTorrent protocol, 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.
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
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both Bram and Ludde are available now on IRC #utorrent and will be answering questions for the next few hours.
A new forum has been created – uTorrent/BitTorrent – please use this new forum for all topics related to the uTorrent acquisition
