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.
Prior to version 6.0, BitTorrent was written in Python, and was free software. Very early versions released prior to December 30, 2001 were released into the public domain without a license. 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.
Read more about this topic: Bit Torrent (software)
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