BitTorrent is the name of a peer-to-peer (P2P) file distribution protocol, and is the name of a free software implementation of that protocol. The protocol was originally designed and created by programmer Bram Cohen, and is now maintained by BitTorrent Inc. BitTorrent is designed to distribute large amounts of data widely without incurring the corresponding consumption in costly server and bandwidth resources. CableLabs, the research organization of the North American cable industry, believes that BitTorrent represents 55% of the upstream traffic on the cable companies’ access network.[1] CacheLogic puts that number at roughly 35% of all traffic on the Internet,[2] although there are dissenting opinions on the methodology to measure P2P traffic on the Internet.[3]
The original BitTorrent client was written in Python. Its source code, as of version 4.0, has been released under the BitTorrent Open Source License, which is a modified version of the Jabber Open Source License. There are numerous compatible clients, written in a variety of programming languages, and running on a variety of computing platforms.
