Elsewhere in Dreams

I’m downloading a bunch of British television right now (and some Scrubs so I don’t end up with an accent). Every once in a while I like to glance at the userstrings of my connected peers. The vast majority of them are uTorrent clients, with a good portion of them reporting as Azureus. There are a smattering of others, which testifies mostly to how well uTorrent has totally soaked up the market in BitTorrent clients.

What’s new and different, however, is how many Transmission clients I see. There are two or three for every connected torrent, a good sign, because Transmission is a great open source client.

One thing that always bothered me about uTorrent was that though it was free as in beer, it was not free as in speech. I didn’t really understand why that was; BitTorrent clients aren’t particularly difficult to implement from what I’ve heard. Of course, once it was bought up it made sense, but that’s another issue. The fact that BitTorrent (the people who originally developed BT, one of whom is named Bram something or other) bought it, and the fact that they are now beholden to the media interests they have gotten into bed with leaves something to be desired in a closed source client. I don’t really know what my software is doing, do I? Where’s the peer review?

Transmission solves all that, and is quite a nice little application to boot. Nice to see the few that I did.

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