Alex Kidman17 June 2008, 2:00 PM
Azureus has gone the same way as Napster and Kazaa... though this time the RIAA wasn't involved; Azureus' makers pulled the plug themselves.
The team behind one of the world's most popular BitTorrent clients, has announced that Azureus will no longer be available as a standalone P2P application, and will now only be used as a part of the Vuze video sharing service.
That's not to say that they're abandoning the heady world of torrents -- merely that the bits and bytes of code that made up the previously free application will henceforth be rolled only into the Vuze team's own content delivery platform, cunningly (or is it confusingly?) named Vuze.
The Vuze platform has been available for some time now, but it's only in today's release of the Vuze 3.1 client that the Azureus component has been discontinued. If you've got an Azureus client install sitting on a hard drive, keep hold of it -- you certainly won't be able to get hold of any newer ones (though, arguably, there are now many better BitTorrent apps out there such as
Transmission and
uTorrent).
Speaking to
TorrentFreak, Vuze CEO Gilles BianRosa is quoted as saying that the move to Vuze was one of avoiding confusion.
"We started to change our name from Azureus to Vuze over a year ago, but we did not make the change in a clear or consistent manner," Gilles said.
"This has caused a great deal of confusion amongst our users. We want to rectify this situation by changing our name to Vuze consistently."Instead, if you head to the Vuze site to download the client application, you're met with a very Prince-esque line: "
Welcome to the hi-res content world of Vuze, formerly known as Azureus." That line continues into the client application itself (although thankfully the team hasn't dropped the Blue Frog logo), which calls itself "
Vuze (Formerly Azureus)". Presumably the Vuze team will abstain from
scrawling "Slave" across their faces and then releasing album after album of increasingly inconsistent and incoherent material while simultaneously
suing any fan insane enough to say anything positive about them online, but anything's possible.
The Vuze 3.1 client platform can be downloaded from Vuze's
Web site.