p2pnet - rss feed: Azureus: joining the Dark Side?
p2p news / p2pnet: “Bram…. Feel the hate rise within you… Feel the power of the dark side,” says a comment to p2pnet’s Q&A with BitTorrent creator Bram Cohen.
It goes on, “Can’t fault the guy for wanting to make a buck,” but, “Actually, yes I can. Bram, you sold out to the worst of the a-holes and became one in the process.”
However, “Azureus sold out too!” – says another Reader’s Write, giving a link to a puff piece slugged, “Azureus to Announce Next Generation Internet Distribution Platform for Digital Entertainment at OnHollywood 2006″.
“Azureus’ vision is to lead the digital entertainment revolution by providing the best solution for media content owners to reach out to a young, Internet-savvy audience in a safe and cost effective way,” says the release. “With one of the largest Internet community, Azureus provides the critical mass for music and movie professionals to access their target audience, as well as for social networking communities to share their passions with high quality videos.”
Torrentfreak says: >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Azureus, one of the most popular bittorrent clients is planning to add a “content layer”. This integrated platform “should” make it possible to share videos and other large files with friends, family and strangers all around the world.
The Azureus team aims to improve the user experience and make sharing and finding content easier and more interactive.
Azureus founder told Slyck:
We’re addressing probably the number one complaint we hear about Azureus: ‘ok, I installed the thing, where do I find some good content for it? We are offering high quality and easy to find content, easy to interact with and share, legal to download, guaranteed availability – it is much more than just search.
The question is: Is this really a step forward or will it only hurt Azureus?
Personally I think it’s a bad one. Azureus is already bloated with features that most users don’t use, this will probably be another one. And where to find torrents? I think a search box will do, like most other clients have.
However, Azureus sees the commercial possibilities for these new features. A lot of companies are struggling to implement bittorrent into their distribution chain, and if it works out, Azureus could provide this for them. But then another question pops up… What about DRM? According to Slyck that option remains open for now. Although the Azureus team doesn’t like DRM, they can’t promise that their content layer stays DRM free.
No DRM if we can get away without it, we all hate DRM ourselves.
Let’s wait and see (and hope for the best). I will certainly hope that they will at least still release a version of Azureus without the content layer in the future.
Torrentfreak - The Netherlands
Also See:
Q&A - p2pnet talks to Bram Cohen, April 28, 2006
April 29th, 2006 at 5:26 pm
Good ol’ disk ripping for me. Outcome is DRM free.
April 29th, 2006 at 5:53 pm
UTorrent FTW!
April 29th, 2006 at 7:05 pm
Eventually all media players , .torrent and p2p will be controlled b y MAFIAA ,I guess it’s back to being a oswellian 1984 state. *Sips tea*
April 30th, 2006 at 12:33 am
Azureus is slow and bloated. I prefer to use the original bittorrent python client.
I’m also working on a bittorrent client of my own written in C, which will be open source. There is actually a lack of good open source C based bittorrent clients out there, don’t get me wrong, python is ok, but, it’s a scripting language after all, and, isn’t as efficient as a well designed C program.
April 30th, 2006 at 8:24 am
Azureus is open source. You can download the source code and all of the trimmings on Source Forge.
One person’s “feature laden” is another person’s “bloated.”
How many companies do NOT buy Microsoft Office because 95% of the their users don’t use 95% of the capabilities contained within it?
Know your way around code? Stub out all the ‘bloat’ you don’t want to deal with in Azureus. Try asking Microsoft for the source for Office so you can do that so the IT Department you run only has to deploy 1500 machines with 512MB instead of 1GB of memory.
If you want a BT client with a small footprint and profile, Azureus would be your LAST choice. Try mu-torrent instead.
Content Layer and DRM? Look for the code to ‘branch’. One code branch will have it, the other won’t. Azureus is NOT just one person. If the subject is too divisive, look for one side or other other to go start a new project called ‘Rozeus’ (with a pinkish-red frog, or whatever) to implement their vision of the next release.
For all it’s “bloat” Azureus has pioneered extending the capability of the original BT protocol. Such Examples are DHT (trackerless tracking, no tracker to attack or subpoena), Transport layer encryption (obscures traffic type from traffic shaping packages, DHT scraping (how many seeders/leechers are REALLY on this torrent?), etc.
If you don’t care for it or it doesn’t function well on your machine, please stop using it, then please stop complaining. There are plenty of other suitable alternatives.
–TurboGeek
PS: Full Disclosure would dictate that I state that I’m an occasional contributor to the AZ QA Team. I would still use AZ if this were the case or not.
May 1st, 2006 at 1:19 am
The opensource movement has effective nullified any software based DRM or restrictions before they are even thought of. MPAA policy maker purchasers, be careful of the legislation you purchase because it can very well come back and bite you in the a$$.
Hardware-based DRM may very well be different, but some enterprising hacker will find a way to use hardware based DRM to help the average person protect their privacy. Just imagine a thief walking into a store ans stealing tens of thousands of dollars in merchandise with the security cameras helpless to stop the thief. Of course the reason that the security cameras are unable to capture the thief is because of government mandated DRM circuitry picking up DRM signals transmitted by the thief. The MPAA will make old school thievery very inviting. Anybody want to actually steal music?
May 1st, 2006 at 5:32 pm
Everyone sells out. Almost every client that coms out and becomes popular sells out. They at first do this to help out the bittorrent network, but then they sell out. Bram became one of the cartels he is nothing but now but a backstabbing scum bag, utorrent and their signing the deal also i perfer to call them rotten bastards. utorrent never was open source, odd eh? azureus well they are bastards now. Maybe it isn’t the necessary fact that the features are “bloated” because you can remove them yourself, but they shouldn’t add useless features. I am planning to simply try make my own open sourced bittorrent client nice good features and lightweight.
but here is the list of the sell outs:
utorrent
simonmoon and sharereactor
azureus
bram
torrentspy admin
the list is endless.
May 1st, 2006 at 5:32 pm
Everyone sells out. Almost every client that coms out and becomes popular sells out. They at first do this to help out the bittorrent network, but then they sell out. Bram became one of the cartels he is nothing but now but a backstabbing scum bag, utorrent and their signing the deal also i perfer to call them rotten bastards. utorrent never was open source, odd eh? azureus well they are bastards now. Maybe it isn’t the necessary fact that the features are “bloated” because you can remove them yourself, but they shouldn’t add useless features. I am planning to simply try make my own open sourced bittorrent client nice good features and lightweight.
but here is the list of the sell outs:
utorrent
simonmoon and sharereactor
azureus
bram
torrentspy admin
the list is endless.
May 2nd, 2006 at 3:24 am
I’ve always been looking for an excuse to switch to the much lighterr utorrent… already got it installed and everything… I’ll wait and see how this pans out, but there’s a great chance that this is the end of Azureus. And a great shame, considering how they bested it on sourceforge.
October 5th, 2006 at 11:29 pm