Back in the summer of 2003 when torrenting was still in its infancy, a new torrent client hit the web promising big things.
Taking the Latin name of the blue poison dart frog and deploying a logo depicting its image, the Azureus client aimed to carve out a niche in what would become a market of several hundred million users.
Written in Java and available on Windows, Linux, OSX, and Android, Azureus (latterly ‘Vuze’) always managed to divide the community. Heralded by many as a feature-rich powerhouse that left no stone unturned, others saw the client as bloated when compared to the more streamlined uTorrent.
All that being said, Vuze knew its place in the market and on the bells-and-whistles front, it always delivered. Its features included swarm-merging, built-in search, DVD-burning capabilities, and device integration. It felt like Vuze was always offering something new.
Indeed, for the past several years and like clockwork, every month new additions and fixes have been deployed to Vuze. Since at least 2012 and up to early 2017, not a single month passed without Vuze being tuned up or improved in some manner via beta or full versions. Now, however, all of that seems to have ground to a halt.
The last full release of Vuze (v5.7.5.0) containing plenty of tweaks and fixes was released on February 28 this year. It followed the previous full release by roughly three months, a pattern its developers have kept up for some time with earlier versions. As expected, the Vuze 5.7.5.1 beta versions followed but on April 10, everything stopped.
It’s now three whole months since Vuze the last beta release, which may not sound like a long time unless one considers the history. Vuze has been actively developed for 14 years and its developers have posted communications on their devblog archives every single month, at least as far back as July 2012. Since then – nothing.
Back in May, a user on Vuze forums noted that none of Vuze’s featured content (such as TED Talks) could be downloaded, while another reported that the client’s anti-virus definitions weren’t updating. Given past scheduling, a new version of the client should have been released about a month ago. Nothing appeared.
To illustrate, this is a screenshot of the Vuze source code repository, which shows the number of code changes committed since 2012. The drastic drop-off in April 2017 (12 commits) versus dozens to even hundreds in preceding months is punctuated by zero commits for the past three months.
[from http://ift.tt/148uEe4]
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