History
Programmer Bram Cohen designed the protocol in April 2001 and released a first implementation of the BitTorrent client on 2 July 2001. It is now maintained by Cohen's company BitTorrent, Inc.
BitTorrent was written in Python, and was free software. Versions up to and including 3.4.2 were distributed under the MIT license. The source code for versions 4.x and 5.x was released under the BitTorrent Open Source License, a modified version of the Jabber Open Source License. Versions 4.0 and 5.3 were relicensed under the GPL.
Version 4.20 of the client was dubbed Allegro by BitTorrent Inc., in reference to protocol extensions developed by the company to accelerate download performance and ISP manageability.
Since version 6.0 the BitTorrent client has been a rebranded version of µTorrent. As a result, it is no longer open source.
Features
The BitTorrent client enables a user to search for and download torrent files using a built-in search box ("Search for torrents") in the main window, which opens the BitTorrent torrent search engine page with the search results in the user's default web browser.
The current client includes a range of features, including multiple parallel downloads. BitTorrent has several statistical, tabular and graphical views that allow a user to see what events are happening in the background. A host of views offer information on the peers and seeds to which the user is connected, including how much data is being downloaded from each and to how much data is being uploaded by each. It has an automatic recovery system that checks all data that has been handled after an improper shutdown. It also intermediates peering between itself, source file servers ("trackers") and other clients, thereby yielding distribution efficiencies. The client also enables users to create and share torrent files.
How To Use BitTorrent
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