Bram Cohen, the creator of the BitTorrent protocol, announced that his company would be finalizing an acquisition of µTorrent today.
“Together, we are pleased to announce that BitTorrent, Inc. and µTorrent AB have decided to join forces,” Cohen wrote in his blog. “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.”
The move will bring quite a few torrent users over to BitTorrent. News site TorrentFreak estimates that buying uTorrent, will bring BitTorrent nearly 50 percent of torrent users.
“What does this mean for the µTorrent community?” wrote Cohen. “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 acquisition price has not yet been disclosed.